Mark Grotjahn

American painter (born 1968)

Mark Grotjahn (born 1968) is an American painter best known for abstract work and bold geometric paintings. Grotjahn lives and works in Los Angeles.

Grotjahn was born in Pasadena, but grew up in the Bay Area. His father Michael, a psychiatrist, had emigrated from Berlin, Germany, in 1936. His paternal grandfather is Martin Grotjahn. He received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1995, he was an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine. When he moved to Los Angeles in 1996, he opened a gallery called Room 702 in Hollywood with his classmate Brent Petersen and started showing and working with other artists.—Room 702 closed after less than two years, and Grotjahn became a full time artist.

In the mid 1990s, Grotjahn began working on a stream of densely worked colored pencil drawings, followed by oil paintings, which focused on perspective investigations such as dual and multiple vanishing points. The way Grotjahn paints grew out of conceptual sign making; he would faithfully reproduce peculiar graphics and phrases from local storefronts in his native Los Angeles. He would then trade these handmade copies to the storeowners in exchange for the original signage. In his multi colored drawings, Grotjahn's working method is systematic and rigorous but also allows for intuition and chance. He first begins by mapping out the triangular radii in black pencil. For each work in this series of drawings, Grotjahn then sets aside the required number of color pencils, choosing colors that "hold together" in value and intensity. Having laid them next to him, he chooses one pencil at random and uses it to color in a single, pre segmented wing section. Since 1997, Grotjahn has been exploring the radiant motif in his paintings and drawings. This sustained investigation is illustrated in his Butterfly series Here, he draws on Renaissance perspectival techniques for the structures and subjects of his multiple vanishing point butterfly patterns in order to create the illusion that his geometries stretch, shrink, approach, and recede. While they appear at first glance to be rigidly formal and graphic, the Butterfly Paintings essentially consist of a radiating sequence of parallel lines are executed in thick oil in such a way that an illusion of perspective is generated by the painting's butterfly form. The horizontal and vertical lines are rarely, if ever, horizontal or perpendicular to the edges of the canvas. in a ski accident. Using sheets of cardboard that are primed and mounted on linen as the ground, Grotjahn employs a brush and palette knife to extensively build layer upon layer of oil paint to almost sculptural ends. Grotjahn's mask sculptures extend the artist's idiosyncratic investment in the process and ritual of painting into three dimensions. Grotjahn maintains a studio in Little Armenia, Los Angeles. In 2011/12, he was Visiting Scholar at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. In 2014, he joined the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles as an artist trustee.

Grotjahn's solo exhibitions include shows at UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2005); the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2006); and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at galleries and museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, P. S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, and Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, in Germany, and the Royal Academy in London. He was included in the 54th Carnegie International in 2004 and the Whitney Biennial in 2006.

Grotjahn is often regarded as one of many contemporary painters revisiting late Modernism, alongside fellow painters Tomma Abts, Wade Guyton, Eileen Quinlan, Sergei Jensen, and Cheyney Thompson.

Grotjahn had his first solo shows with Blum & Poe in 1998 and 2000, selling only one artwork from the second show. At Sotheby's New York in May 2015, one bidder paid $6.5 million for Grotjahn’s abstracted face painting, Untitled (Into and Behind the Green Eyes of the Tiger Monkey Face 43.18) (2011), against a high estimate of $3 million. On May 17, 2017 a new price record was set for a Grotjahn work at auction when “Untitled (S III Released to France Face 43.14)” was sold for $16.8 million dollars
Grotjahn is represented by Anton Kern Gallery in New York, Gagosian Gallery in London, Blum and Poe Gallery in Los Angeles, Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago and Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo.

In 2011, Grotjahn sued MOCA trustee Dean Valentine, one of his earliest collectors, to recover a 5% royalty for three artworks that Valentine resold. The biggest sale in dispute took place in 2008 at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York, when Valentine sold Untitled (Blue Face Grotjahn) (2005) for $1,217,000, including premium. After more than a year of court filings and court ordered mediation, both parties settled the dispute in 2012 over the payment of the resale royalty specified by the California Resale Royalty Act. Valentine agreed to pay Grotjahn $153,255; this figure includes the 5% resale royalty (plus interest) on one painting and one drawing that the collector had bought and resold, amounting to $68,255, plus $85,000 toward Grotjahn’s legal fees.