Beschreibung:

Mark Grotjahn Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective) 1997 coloured pencil on paper 61 x 48.3 cm. (24 x 19 in.) Signed and dated 'Mark Grotjahn 1997' on the reverse.
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist Phillips de Pury & Company, New York,Under the Influence, 21 March 2008, Lot 17 Acquired from the above sale by the present owner Exhibited New York, The Drawing Center, Selections Winter 1998. Ingrid Calame Miriam Dym, Mark Grotjahn Gerhard Mayer, and Stephanie Syjuco, 9 January - 14 February 1998 Literature M. Grotjahn, Mark Grotjahn Drawings, Ostfildern, 2006 p. 60 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay 'I was always interested in line and color. I wanted to find a motif that I could experiment with for a while. I did a group of drawings over a period of six to twelve months. The drawing that I chose was one that resembled the three tier perspective, and that is what I went with.' (Mark Grotjahn as quoted in A. Douglass, 'Interview with Mark Grotjahn 'Portland Art, 6 October 2010, Online.) Driven from both modernist abstraction and pop culture, Mark Grotjahn’s works are personal allurements, between the naturally hard-edged representation of geometric abstraction and emotive communication. In his Three-Tiered Perspective series, Grotjahn uses various vanishing points to create an optical effect, portraying a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. As a forerunner to his renowned Butterfly paintings, this series is a vibrant exploration of multiple perspectives and a creation of deep space and movement. Having begun working with coloured pencils to develop perspective drawings, he soon established a distinction in his field of work; an intense exploration of a more conventional drawing being the collusion of abstract criteria and random collection, characteristic of the oeuvre Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective), 1997. Creating such compositions of three different horizontal landscapes, Mark Grotjahn focuses on the eye as an instrument, ‘the eye is always searching for an implicit point of stability that cannot be found’ (Aspen Art Museum, Mark Grotjahn Aspen Art Press, 2012, p.62). Whilst his Butterfly series focuses the eye on a single view point, the use of various vanishing points on one single work draw the viewer inward creating an illusion of deep space and motion on a flat surface. Playing with the rigors of perception, he is in effect producing a hallucinatory vision. With the inspiration of a more traditional technique from the Renaissance era but with modern day creativity, Grotjahn manipulates the use of linear perspective with bold tonal modulations of colour to create a vibrant sense of depth, giving existence to both form and colour and allowing them to exist individually. This technique, for Grotjahn, creates the structure of the work and essentially becomes the principal of the subject. The shifted placements of the points break the compositional balance. The final product is a simple arrangement of coloured forms which results in a composition of movement, proportion, colour and focus. While there is an almost classical lucidity to Grotjahn's established organization of dividing the composition into three separate rectangular rows of converging polychromatic stripes all of which are separated by horizontal bands, his use of colour is to a certain extent completely random. The random arrangement of the colours comes from the result of him giving up his choice of colours and picking them blindly, ‘It’s as if the body of colour matters more than the identity of particular colours’ (Aspen Art Museum, Mark Grotjahn Aspen Art Press, 2012, p. 60). In each row the stripes of colour become thinner and thinner as they culminate towards their own climax. The result for Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective) is the optical illusion of three-dimensional landscape receding towards a horizon through a variety of colour, space and direction. Read More