Artist Spotlight
In his paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Mark Grotjahn interweaves and revitalizes various historical modes of abstraction, probing the limits between gesture and geometry, impulse and exactitude. His works unfold according to precise yet mutating rubrics, resulting in an expansive vocabulary of visual motifs that migrate from one series to the next in almost obsessive permutations. By finding variations within his immediately identifiable style, Grotjahn reveals the complexities of authorial gesture.
Created in response to the covid-19 pandemic, the Artist Spotlight series highlights individual artists, one week at a time, whose exhibitions have been affected by the health crisis. A single artwork by the artist is made available with pricing information for forty-eight hours only.
Artist Spotlight: Mark Grotjahn features a recent work by the artist. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.
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Photo: Olivier Zahm
Related Exhibitions
Related News
In Conversation
Mark Grotjahn
Andrew Fabricant
Monday, October 10, 2022, 6:15pm
Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London
Join Gagosian for a conversation between Mark Grotjahn and Andrew Fabricant, the gallery’s chief operating officer, on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition Backcountry at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London. The pair will discuss Grotjahn’s long-standing exploration of the formal and expressive possibilities of paint, his ongoing experimentation with abstract mark making, and events in his professional and personal life that have informed the new works on view.
Mark Grotjahn in his studio, Los Angeles, 2022. Artwork © Mark Grotjahn
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)
Art Fair
Art Basel Hong Kong 2023
March 22–25, 2023
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
www.artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 with a presentation of modern and contemporary works by international artists.
Jadé Fadojutimi, As usual, the season’s showers tend to linger, 2023 © Jadé Fadojutimi
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