Mark
Grotjahn (born 1968) is an American painter best known for abstract work and
bold geometric paintings. Grotjahn lives and works in Los Angeles.
Mark
Grotjahn’s paintings have long pitted two important strands of early modernism
— abstraction and masklike Expressionist faces — against each other and also
against African art, to which both are so indebted. A few years ago, to his
benefit, he started painting on bronze casts of cardboard boxes as well as
canvas. His latest efforts, which he collectively calls “Painted Sculpture,”
are gorgeously preposterous.
Grotjahn's
mask sculptures extend the artist's idiosyncratic investment in the process and
ritual of painting into three dimensions. Cast in bronze from spontaneous
cardboard assemblages and often painted with the fingers, most of them rest on
pedestals, while a few are wall-mounted, referring directly to painting.
But it is
mostly up to us to sort the shifting parts of these half-alive, emphatically
made things. For example, the two van Gogh-titled paintings initially made me
think of organized Joan Mitchell surfaces. The long noses of course conjure
Pinocchio, suggesting that Mr. Grotjahn’s latest hybrids could be as false as
they are true.
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