ART CITIES:N.York-Mark Grotjahn

Mark Grotjahn’s paintings and drawings are light-hearted takes on geometric abstraction. Many of his works use his “butterfly model” of skewed perspectival lines. These images conjure both infinite transcendence and the graphic design of book covers or psychedelic posters. Additionally, by referring to these pieces directly as butterflies, Grotjahn complicates the initially abstract appearance of the works, but without allowing them to completely become representations of their namesakes either.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kaikai Kiki & Gagosian Galleries Archive

In the exhibition “Mark Grotjahn: Untitled (Captain America)” the core of the show is the homonymous, large-scale, ten-part drawing with its centrifugal radiant motif, Grotjahn synthesizes the comic-book hero into pure, vibrating lines of force in symbolic red, white, and blue. Geometry and process resonate with each other in the razor-sharp perspectival rays and random, all-over marks, traces of Grotjahn’s tenacious working method, as he moves from one drawing to another-as well as the skeins of acid-yellow calligraphy that surface from time to time, like an Abstract Expressionist palimpsest. Appearing in the early ’40s, the comic-book hero was designed as a patriotic super-soldier who fought the Axis powers of WW II. Although Captain America often struggles to maintain his ideals as a man out of time with modern realities, after seventy years he remains a beloved national figure, combatting those who espouse ideals contrary to the American Dream, from Nazism to technocratic fascism, and international and domestic terrorism. In the large-scale, ten-part drawing with its centrifugal radiant motif, Grotjahn synthesizes the comic-book hero into pure, vibrating lines of force in symbolic red, white, and blue. Geometry and process resonate with each other in the razor-sharp perspectival rays and random, all-over marks, traces of Grotjahn’s tenacious working method, as he moves from one drawing to another, as well as the skeins of acid-yellow calligraphy that surface from time to time, like an Abstract Expressionist palimpsest. These formalist compositions of complex asymmetries and glowing, tonal color allude to the multiple narratives coursing through the history of modernism, from the utopian visions of Russian Constructivism to the hallucinatory images of Op art. The disruptive presence of errant marks and smudges across the surface of each drawing introduces a sense of active contingency into compositions that are otherwise highly controlled.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 19/1-20/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com