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Lot Essay
A wild panorama of colour, line and texture, Untitled (Capri 53.05) is a vivid painting from Mark Grotjahn’s celebrated Capri series. Upon a pale background, ribbons of red, yellow and blue ricochet and collide. Strands of thick impasto cover the composition like webs, while near-sculptural protrusions dance across the surface, creating a scintillating rhythmic counterpoint. Executed in 2020, the work forms part of Grotjahn’s most important recent body of work, inspired by a stay on the island of Capri in 2016. Extending the language of his landmark Face paintings, these works continue his fascination with perspective, colour and optical effect. At the same time, however, they represent an important shift in his artistic language. Where the Face paintings retained some sense of figuration, the Capri series spirals towards total abstraction, alive with freedom, spontaneity and chaos.
Grotjahn’s trip to Capri was pivotal. While there, he stayed in Casa Malaparte: a house built for the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte in the 1930s. Located on Punta Massullo on the uninhabited eastern side of the island, this stunning piece of Modernist architecture had been partially designed by Malaparte himself, and was built directly into the rocky cliff-face. The house, significantly, had featured in Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic 1963 film Le Mépris, starring Brigitte Bardot. Inspired by the drama of the landscape, Grotjahn began to paint, initially working on a small scale in his New Capri series before branching out into larger formats in the Capri and Free Capri works. The artist embraced the rugged surface of his cardboard support, allowing its texture to remain visible beneath the layers of paint. Using a palette knife, he wove together improvised lines and spatters, delighting in the rills of paint that built up at the tool’s edge. In the present work, the pressure of the knife forces the lines of the cardboard’s structure to the surface, calling to mind the works of Max Ernst.
Grotjahn’s Face paintings had propelled him to public acclaim. While rich abstract influences lurked within their depths—from Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee to Cubism and Op Art—they still bore recognisable hints of human anatomy. The Capri paintings, by contrast, dispensed with any attempt at figurative structure. For Grotjahn, it was a liberating leap into the unknown. ‘I would put [the paint deposits] on a palette knife and line them up’, he explains. ‘I would string them at the top of a painting as if they were popcorn on a Christmas tree. I’d see how I felt about that. It was poetic and nice … I was experimenting with that. It became a process of putting down some lines, scraping them, getting lines that worked’ (M. Grotjahn, quoted in P. Tuchman, ‘Mark Grotjahn on his latest show’, Artforum, 17 December 2018). Though allusions to the natural landscape emerge in spite of themselves, the paintings remain guided by instinct and intuition. In the present work, speed, rhythm, colour and texture become subjects in their own right, bound together in an inseparable dance.
Grotjahn’s trip to Capri was pivotal. While there, he stayed in Casa Malaparte: a house built for the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte in the 1930s. Located on Punta Massullo on the uninhabited eastern side of the island, this stunning piece of Modernist architecture had been partially designed by Malaparte himself, and was built directly into the rocky cliff-face. The house, significantly, had featured in Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic 1963 film Le Mépris, starring Brigitte Bardot. Inspired by the drama of the landscape, Grotjahn began to paint, initially working on a small scale in his New Capri series before branching out into larger formats in the Capri and Free Capri works. The artist embraced the rugged surface of his cardboard support, allowing its texture to remain visible beneath the layers of paint. Using a palette knife, he wove together improvised lines and spatters, delighting in the rills of paint that built up at the tool’s edge. In the present work, the pressure of the knife forces the lines of the cardboard’s structure to the surface, calling to mind the works of Max Ernst.
Grotjahn’s Face paintings had propelled him to public acclaim. While rich abstract influences lurked within their depths—from Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee to Cubism and Op Art—they still bore recognisable hints of human anatomy. The Capri paintings, by contrast, dispensed with any attempt at figurative structure. For Grotjahn, it was a liberating leap into the unknown. ‘I would put [the paint deposits] on a palette knife and line them up’, he explains. ‘I would string them at the top of a painting as if they were popcorn on a Christmas tree. I’d see how I felt about that. It was poetic and nice … I was experimenting with that. It became a process of putting down some lines, scraping them, getting lines that worked’ (M. Grotjahn, quoted in P. Tuchman, ‘Mark Grotjahn on his latest show’, Artforum, 17 December 2018). Though allusions to the natural landscape emerge in spite of themselves, the paintings remain guided by instinct and intuition. In the present work, speed, rhythm, colour and texture become subjects in their own right, bound together in an inseparable dance.