About
Because I have an active and obsessive eye‚ I’m interested in finding as much contentment as I possibly can. In my work I create problems and then solve them in order to feel peace.
—Mark Grotjahn
Mark Grotjahn combines gesture and geometry with abstraction and figuration in visually dynamic paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. Each of his series reflects a range of art-historical influences and unfolds in almost obsessive permutations.
Grotjahn was born in Pasadena, California. He received a BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. While studying in California, he began his first major project, Sign Exchange (1993–98), in which he painted replicas of signs that he saw in stores around Los Angeles, then had the store owners display his hand-painted versions in place of the originals. In 1995 Grotjahn was an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine. He moved to Los Angeles a year later and, with his classmate Brent Petersen, opened the short-lived gallery Room 702.
In 2001 Grotjahn began the Butterfly series. These geometric paintings and drawings explore the constructs of dual and multi-point perspective and take on various forms as Grotjahn alters their composition and color. A selection of multicolored and monochromatic Butterfly works on paper were exhibited in 2005 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2018 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented 50 Kitchens (2013–18), from the same series, a work with more than fifty parts that all evolved from a single composition and incorporate residual traces of earlier drawings. Continuing his investigations of symmetry, perspective, and form, Grotjahn began the Face paintings in 2003. These expressive, anthropomorphic works of cardboard on canvas often feature sections cut away to reveal painted canvas beneath. As the series progresses, the faces become less apparent and more abstract, their curved lines creating void-like apertures.
Alongside his painting practice, Grotjahn has been making masks since 2000, painting cardboard boxes lying around his studio and affixing paper tubes between cut-out “eyes.” The Masks (2000–), although originally approached as a less formal project, came to assert themselves as a new armature for his painting. In 2010 Grotjahn started casting the Masks in bronze. In many of the sculptures, he incorporated and retained remnants of the bronze casting process, such as the sprues and runners, into his final work. As he does with his paintings, Grotjahn often boldly signs the Masks, allowing his signature to come forward as a compositional element. In 2014 the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas presented the first museum exhibition of Grotjahn’s sculpture, including small-scale and larger freestanding works.
In 2016 Grotjahn began the Capri works (2016–), seeking to break away from the Face paintings in favor of a more experimental, spontaneous working process. The first Capri works, New Capri, were modestly scaled paintings created for a private presentation at Casa Malaparte in Capri, Italy. Following this exhibition, Grotjahn created the Capri paintings (2016–), followed by the Free Capri series (2018–), in which he introduced the technique of scraping out areas of thick paint, then placing the resulting “slugs” in rows and grids elsewhere on the canvas.
As the Butterflies, Faces, Masks, and Capri series continue to expand, Grotjahn uses Instagram to further experiment with repetition and juxtaposition, employing the grid format to freely arrange images in different combinations, in a form of visual tic-tac-toe. Throughout his work, by finding variations within his immediately identifiable style, Grotjahn reveals the complexities of authorial gesture.

Photo: Monica Almeida/The New York Times/Redux
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Exhibitions
Fairs, Events & Announcements

Support
The Kitchen
Ice and Fire: A Benefit Exhibition in Three Parts
October 15, 2020–March 13, 2021
The benefit exhibition Ice and Fire features works by more than forty artists who have enduring relationships with the Kitchen in New York. Installed within the organization’s three-story space in Chelsea, which is currently closed due to the global pandemic, the three-part exhibition is viewable online. Proceeds from sales will go toward a planned renovation on the occasion of the Kitchen’s fiftieth anniversary, ensuring that the nonprofit space will remain a platform for artistic experimentation in its historic and beloved building. Work by Cecily Brown, Roe Ethridge, Mark Grotjahn, Alex Israel, Ed Ruscha, Taryn Simon, Mary Weatherford, and Christopher Wool is included.
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Capri 53.57), 2020 © Mark Grotjahn

Art Fair
Basel Online 2020
In our most significant online sales presentation to date, Gagosian unveils important works by modern and contemporary masters through two separate online platforms—Gagosian Online and Art Basel Online. These individually curated selections offer collectors direct access to artworks of the highest caliber. To experience the presentation in its entirety, viewers will need to visit both gagosian.com and artbasel.com. The works on gagosian.com will rotate every forty-eight hours, for a total of five cycles.
Helen Frankenthaler, Orange Underline, 1963 © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Online Reading
Mark Grotjahn
Casa Malaparte
Mark Grotjahn: Casa Malaparte is available for online reading from May 27 through June 26 as part of Artist Spotlight: Mark Grotjahn. The book documents a presentation of paintings and sculptures by the artist at the landmark modernist house designed by writer Curzio Malaparte on the Italian island of Capri. The exhibition marked the first presentation of Grotjahn’s Capri paintings.
Mark Grotjahn: Casa Malaparte (New York: Gagosian, 2017)
Museum Exhibitions

Closed
Mark Grotjahn
50 Kitchens
May 20–August 19, 2018
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
www.lacma.org
Conceived as one work, Mark Grotjahn’s 50 Kitchens (2013–18) takes its inspiration from a single Butterfly composition that Grotjahn made to meet the dimensional specifications of a wall in his kitchen. The more than fifty subsequent chromatic drawings explore pairs of radiating colors and together create a prismatic display. Grotjahn began making his Butterfly compositions in 2001. This exhibition was the first presentation of 50 Kitchens at LACMA.
Installation view, Mark Grotjahn: 50 Kitchens, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, May 20–August 19, 2018. Artwork © Mark Grotjahn. Photo: Museum Associates/LACMA

Closed
The Forever Now
Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World
December 14, 2014–April 5, 2015
Museum of Modern Art, New York
www.moma.org
Forever Now presents the work of seventeen artists whose paintings reflect a singular approach that characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of the new millennium: they refuse to allow us to define or even meter our time by them. They represent a wide variety of styles and impulses, but all use the painted surface as a platform, map, or metaphoric screen on which genres intermingle, morph, and collide. Work by Joe Bradley, Mark Grotjahn, and Mary Weatherford is included.
Mary Weatherford, la noche, 2014 © Mary Weatherford. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio

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Mark Grotjahn
Sculpture
May 31–August 17, 2014
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
www.nashersculpturecenter.org
This exhibition was the first dedicated museum presentation of Mark Grotjahn’s sculpture, which the artist began producing privately in 2000, alongside his painting practice. It showcased many never-before-seen, three-dimensional works, ranging in size from small, intimate compositions to larger-scale freestanding works. Combining common cardboard boxes and tubes and cutting them to roughly resemble masks or faces, Grotjahn then scraped these assemblages and cast them in bronze, which he either left raw or elaborately painted.
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Scribble Scrabble French Mask M31.b), 2013 © Mark Grotjahn

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Mark Grotjahn
Circus Circus
May 16–July 27, 2014
Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany
www.kunstvereinfreiburg.de
Circus Circus was Mark Grotjahn’s first solo exhibition in Germany. Both adopting and commenting on a range of art historical influences, from Renaissance-era drawing technique to Abstract Expressionism and Op art, the works on view demonstrated the artist’s ability to combine the opposing modes of abstraction and figuration. The presentation included a new series of large-scale paintings.
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Circus No. 2 Face 44.19), 2013 © Mark Grotjahn