Lot 40
Mark Grotjahn(born 1968)Untitled (Colored Butterfly White Sides 691)
2007
2007
18 November 2020, 13:00 EST
New YorkUS$200,000 - US$300,000
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Mark Grotjahn (born 1968)
Untitled (Colored Butterfly White Sides 691)
2007
signed, titled, dated 2007 and numbered #691 on the reverse
colored pencil on paper
65 3/4 by 47 3/4 in.
167 by 121.3 cm.
2007
signed, titled, dated 2007 and numbered #691 on the reverse
colored pencil on paper
65 3/4 by 47 3/4 in.
167 by 121.3 cm.
Footnotes
Provenance
The Artist, Los Angeles
Private Collection, Los Angeles (acquired from the above in 2007)
Private Collection, Monaco
Private Collection, USA
Gagosian Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
"The butterfly has become to Mark Grotjahn what the target is to Kenneth Noland, the zip was to Barnett Newman, and the color white is to Robert Ryman." - Michael Ned Holte, 'Mark Grotjahn' in Artforum, New York 2005.
A singular example in Grotjahn's Butterfly series, his most celebrated body of work, Untitled (Colored Butterfly White Sides 691) from 2007, exhibits a number of unique aesthetic decisions relating to the artist's interpretation of perspectival space that cements it as a masterwork of the series. The central composition features a multitude of vanishing points, drawing the viewer's eye through the riotous, contrasting bands of color. Further charging the dynamism of the surface are the brackets of negative space, an absence that only heightens the impact of the radiating colors.
Melding the abstract and the organic, the butterfly wings in the present work simultaneously emanate and recede in warp speed. Grounded in the foundation of 1960s Op Art and mining sources as historic as Alberti's treatise on one-point perspective, Grotjahn has ushered the style into the 21st century, the Concretism of Bridget Riley or Victor Vasarely giving way to the deliberate and painstaking handmade artistry that is quintessentially of the artist, and the era. Given the visual and art historical boundaries that Grotjahn's Butterfly series explores, other examples from this sought-after series can be found in major collections and institutions including New York's Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
