Mark Grotjahn

Mark Grotjahn
Mark Grotjahn
Born	1968 Pasadena, California, U.S.
Occupation	Painter

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. 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. Despite an invitation to move into the 6150 complex on Wilshire Boulevard—which already housed other renowned galleries—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.

Later Grotjahn began working with colored pencils to develop "perspective drawings" and then perspectival paintings. 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.

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