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Lot Essay
‘The Face Paintings allow me to express myself in a way that the Butterflies don’t’ (Mark Grotjahn)
A kaleidoscopic explosion of line and colour, the present work is a mesmerising example of Mark Grotjahn’s Face Paintings. Executed in 2011, the year before his first major US retrospective at the Aspen Art Museum, it belongs to one of the artist’s most important series. In these extraordinary large-scale works, Grotjahn began to introduce glimmers of figuration into his virtuosic abstract language. Here, from a swirling vortex of elliptical forms and rich, jewel-toned impasto, hints of human facial features emerge: a pair of skewed eyes, or perhaps the bridge of a nose. Alive with references to European Modernism and American abstraction, the work quivers with tactile painterly magic and raw optical illusion. Acquired shortly after its creation, it takes its place alongside examples held in major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Grotjahn’s Face Paintings demonstrate his interest in artists who were inspired by tribal art forms. As evidenced by his own Mask series, begun the year after the present work, he was fascinated by the primitivist aesthetic pursued by many painters during the twentieth century. The abstracted human anatomies of the Face Paintings recall the works of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Jean Dubuffet: artists who, in turn, would inspire the energetic visual language of Jean-Michel Basquiat. There are nods, too, to the rich chromatic legacies of Fauvism and Expressionism. Yet the series also takes its cues from the history of abstraction, evoking the hypnotic retinal effects of Op Art, as well as the works of Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. As the critic Roberta Smith writes, they ‘emphasise painting as a psychic and bodily process fuelled in part by the devouring and digesting of previous art to formulate a new synthesis’ (R. Smith, ‘Mark Grotjahn: Nine Faces’, The New York Times, 12 May 2011).
Born in California, Grotjahn came to prominence in the 1990s with his Sign Replacement Project, in which he would make careful copies of shop signs and trade them for the originals. His graphic flair led him to experiment with perspective and multiple vanishing points, and eventually gave rise to his series of Butterfly Paintings in the early 2000s. In these works, coloured segments fanned out in skewed perspectival arrangements to resemble the wings of a butterfly. The Face Paintings evolved directly from this series, combing the precise draughtsmanship of the Butterflies with a new sense of painterly freedom and improvisation. ‘The Face Paintings allow me to express myself in a way that the Butterflies don’t’, explained Grotjahn. ‘I have an idea as to what sort of face is going to happen when I do a Face Painting, but I don’t exactly know what colour it will take, or how many eyes it's going to have’ (M. Grotjahn, quoted in interview with J. Tumlir, ‘Big Nose Baby and the Moose’, Flash Art, No. 252, January-February 2007).
In this sense, the Face Paintings ultimately blur the line between figuration and abstraction. The present work’s complex topography, riddled with rich networks of thatched, undulating texture, seems to collapse all sense of perspective, free-wheeling into the void. At the same time, the viewer is keenly aware of the human force lurking within. Eyes seem to pop up everywhere, multiplying across the canvas. Now and then one glimpses the trace of a feather in a cap, or a chiselled cheekbone. The more abstract the surface becomes, the more the figure seems to proliferate. ‘I think of magic carpets and magnetic fields’, wrote the critic Jerry Saltz. ‘I spy networks of Martian canals and landscapes folding over themselves. I glimpse one of painting’s oldest purposes: the uncanny ability to conjure beings and invoke spirits’ (J. Saltz, ‘Making the Spirits Dance’, New York Magazine, 5 June 5 2011). As we peer ever deeper into the work’s otherworldly surface, an unblinking, unmistakable presence stares back.
A kaleidoscopic explosion of line and colour, the present work is a mesmerising example of Mark Grotjahn’s Face Paintings. Executed in 2011, the year before his first major US retrospective at the Aspen Art Museum, it belongs to one of the artist’s most important series. In these extraordinary large-scale works, Grotjahn began to introduce glimmers of figuration into his virtuosic abstract language. Here, from a swirling vortex of elliptical forms and rich, jewel-toned impasto, hints of human facial features emerge: a pair of skewed eyes, or perhaps the bridge of a nose. Alive with references to European Modernism and American abstraction, the work quivers with tactile painterly magic and raw optical illusion. Acquired shortly after its creation, it takes its place alongside examples held in major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Grotjahn’s Face Paintings demonstrate his interest in artists who were inspired by tribal art forms. As evidenced by his own Mask series, begun the year after the present work, he was fascinated by the primitivist aesthetic pursued by many painters during the twentieth century. The abstracted human anatomies of the Face Paintings recall the works of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Jean Dubuffet: artists who, in turn, would inspire the energetic visual language of Jean-Michel Basquiat. There are nods, too, to the rich chromatic legacies of Fauvism and Expressionism. Yet the series also takes its cues from the history of abstraction, evoking the hypnotic retinal effects of Op Art, as well as the works of Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. As the critic Roberta Smith writes, they ‘emphasise painting as a psychic and bodily process fuelled in part by the devouring and digesting of previous art to formulate a new synthesis’ (R. Smith, ‘Mark Grotjahn: Nine Faces’, The New York Times, 12 May 2011).
Born in California, Grotjahn came to prominence in the 1990s with his Sign Replacement Project, in which he would make careful copies of shop signs and trade them for the originals. His graphic flair led him to experiment with perspective and multiple vanishing points, and eventually gave rise to his series of Butterfly Paintings in the early 2000s. In these works, coloured segments fanned out in skewed perspectival arrangements to resemble the wings of a butterfly. The Face Paintings evolved directly from this series, combing the precise draughtsmanship of the Butterflies with a new sense of painterly freedom and improvisation. ‘The Face Paintings allow me to express myself in a way that the Butterflies don’t’, explained Grotjahn. ‘I have an idea as to what sort of face is going to happen when I do a Face Painting, but I don’t exactly know what colour it will take, or how many eyes it's going to have’ (M. Grotjahn, quoted in interview with J. Tumlir, ‘Big Nose Baby and the Moose’, Flash Art, No. 252, January-February 2007).
In this sense, the Face Paintings ultimately blur the line between figuration and abstraction. The present work’s complex topography, riddled with rich networks of thatched, undulating texture, seems to collapse all sense of perspective, free-wheeling into the void. At the same time, the viewer is keenly aware of the human force lurking within. Eyes seem to pop up everywhere, multiplying across the canvas. Now and then one glimpses the trace of a feather in a cap, or a chiselled cheekbone. The more abstract the surface becomes, the more the figure seems to proliferate. ‘I think of magic carpets and magnetic fields’, wrote the critic Jerry Saltz. ‘I spy networks of Martian canals and landscapes folding over themselves. I glimpse one of painting’s oldest purposes: the uncanny ability to conjure beings and invoke spirits’ (J. Saltz, ‘Making the Spirits Dance’, New York Magazine, 5 June 5 2011). As we peer ever deeper into the work’s otherworldly surface, an unblinking, unmistakable presence stares back.