Grotjahn's Game

by Michael Rutherford

Untitled (Green Butterfly Yellow MG), 2003, oil on linen, 73 x 49 inches
Collection of David Teiger, Image courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, NY. 
Photo: Adam Reich

Sometimes a game is played so well that it’s taken to an artistic level and sometimes art is gamed so well that it’s taken to another place altogether. Mark Grotjahn is one of the art world’s best gamers. Known for his paintings that combine a heavy dose of materiality with visual resonance, his whole body of work actually stretches along a continuum from highly formal, to a very funky brand of informality. This continuum, this space he’s made for himself, is actually an extension of a conceptual game—a game of an artistic sort.

from the Sign Exchange project

Earlier in Grotjahn’s career, the steps that he took were more obvious examples of concept and performance. The early 1990’s found him rearranging products in grocery stores and photographing the results. In his Sign Exchange project, Grotjahn switched out signs from small business establishments and replaced them with copies he had made as stand-ins. Then, in agreement with the various business owners, Grotjahn exhibited the originals as art. Another one of those early artistic experiments even consisted of a foray into gambling at Las Vegas in 2001. As a strategic measure, Grotjahn logged notes on matchbook covers complete with little quips to remember, telling himself to watch out for “the small connectors,” for example.

Consisting of the grit of life along with its risks, his gambling experience was a foreshadowing of his current strategy, a conceptual practice that resembles a long, drawn-out game of poker.  A major clue that underscores this fact is his limited edition for Parkett magazine from 2007. Called Spinner Winner, it consists of a coin-sized metal disk with a painted image on one side and a point in the middle on the reverse. The stated purpose for the object is that it’s to be used as a card cover to prevent opponents from slyly peeking at them as they lay flat on a table during a game. The object’s other use, however, is that it can be spun like a top with the pointed end facedown while the image side blurs into an abstraction of itself.

Untitled (Red Face 773), 2007-08, oil on cardboard mounted on linen, 72 x 54 inches
Image courtesy of the artist and The Heller Group
Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio

From his very minimal Butterfly paintings to the radical Face series, his Flower paintings and finally the Mask sculptures, Grotjahn’s oeuvre is unique in its range from institutional rigor to intrepid ruggedness.  In 2010 and again in 2011, he showed new groups of Face paintings—sprawling sgraffito-like forms in oil on cardboard mounted to linen. These works were shown following a large 2009 exhibit at Gagosian Gallery which consisted primarily of his Butterfly paintings. This display of one set of work after the other in different years caused many to err when they stated that Grotjahn’s Face paintings were a new direction for him. They were not; he had actually been producing four distinct series of work (and a few others) all along.

Untitled (Angry Flower, Big Nose, Baby Moose, #4), 2006, oil, cotton and staples on canvas,
58 x 48 inches, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, NY

What’s beautiful about Grotjahn’s conceptual modality is his aesthetic freedom. A reflection of the times, he’s free to create his typically monochrome Butterfly paintings and in the opposite direction, he’s obviously comfortable enough to make his Mask sculptures out of cardboard boxes and toilet paper rolls. Mid-range provides for the Face paintings and the onerous Flower series complete with socks for noses. As for exhibiting any of the four lines of work, just like a game of poker, one never knows which card Grotjahn will choose to play next.

Masks, acrylic on cardboard, dimensions vary

This brings us to consider what is about to happen at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado from February 17th to April 29th. Grotjahn will have the first comprehensive survey of his work from the late 1990’s to the present. The show will feature five new Mask sculptures—one to be exhibited at the Museum along with the rest of his work, while the other four will be displayed at the peak of each of the Aspen Skiing Company's four mountains. So, to see all of the Masks, one must make a pilgrimage in order to get to them. In this curious twist in his conceptual approach, Grotjahn has effectively elevated his seemingly lowest aesthetic level of work, locating it to a plane physically higher than where his most rigorous will be found—a move of artistic dissonance and true gamesmanship on his part.

To see more of Mark Grotjahn's work, see additional articles on our companion sites:  Painter's Bread and Postmodern Toaster.

For more on the Mark Grotjahn exhibition:  aspenartmuseum.org