Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: the story of Mark Grotjahn (born in 1968) is that of an artist who forces us to rethink our relationship with abstraction and the materiality of painting. But beware, don’t be mistaken—he’s not one of those pseudo-intellectuals who spend their time theorizing art in gilded salons of the 16th arrondissement. No, Grotjahn is a wild animal of painting, a predator stalking its prey with surgical precision, armed with palette knives and oil paint tubes.
I’m going to talk to you about two fundamental aspects of his work that perfectly illustrate his singular approach: his “Butterflies” series and his “Face Paintings”. And trust me, if you think geometric abstraction is an outdated concept, you’re going to have to swallow your hasty judgments.
Let’s start with his “Butterflies”, those hypnotic canvases that emerged in the late 1990s. Don’t be fooled by the misleading title—these works have nothing to do with decorative butterflies adorning tourist gallery walls. No, Grotjahn seizes Renaissance perspective techniques and blows them to smithereens. He creates radiant compositions that seem to pulse with energy, as if Piero della Francesca and Barnett Newman had an illegitimate child raised by Frank Stella. Every line is drawn with obsessive precision, creating multiple vanishing points that destabilize our perception. It’s as if the artist is telling us, “You want perspective? I’ll give you so much perspective you’ll overdose”.
This approach echoes what Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in The Eye and the Mind about our perception of the visible world. Grotjahn doesn’t just represent space; he deconstructs it to force us to question our own relationship to reality. And while some collectors marvel at colorful NFTs, he delves into the very foundations of our visual perception with almost scientific rigor.
But it’s in his “Face Paintings” that Grotjahn reaches an even more fascinating dimension. After injuring his shoulder in 2008 (a skiing accident, not a bar fight in trendy Los Angeles), he had to reinvent his way of painting. The result? Strikingly brutal abstract faces applied with a palette knife on cardboard mounted on canvas. These works are like primitive masks passed through a postmodern shredder. Eyes, noses, and mouths emerge from thick layers of paint like fossils in rock.
This series evokes Georges Bataille’s reflections on formlessness and the transgression of limits. Each canvas is a battlefield where figuration and abstraction clash in a macabre dance. The pictorial surface becomes an experimental ground where the very material seems alive, pulsating. We’re far from the delicate still lifes that make some Parisian collectors proud—you know, those who still confuse Picasso with Picabia.
Grotjahn works like a boxer, delivering palette knife blows with controlled violence. His gestures are both brutal and precise, creating accumulations of matter that defy gravity. Grotjahn’s color palette is equally provocative. He uses hues straight out of a psychedelic nightmare: acidic greens, bloody reds, toxic yellows. These choices aren’t arbitrary—they create a visual tension that keeps the viewer in a constant state of alertness. It’s as if Francis Bacon decided to remake 2001: A Space Odyssey in collaboration with Helen Frankenthaler.
His Little Armenia studio in Los Angeles has become a sort of laboratory where he pushes his experiments ever further. Outside of any concept or discourse, Grotjahn remains faithful to a physical, almost violent approach to painting. He doesn’t theorize; he acts. He doesn’t conceptualize; he attacks the canvas.
This approach echoes Theodor Adorno’s theories on negativity in modern art. Grotjahn consciously rejects dominant aesthetic conventions to create something radically new. His works don’t aim to please—they aim to provoke a visceral reaction in the viewer.
The art market, of course, has responded enthusiastically, as it always does when faced with apparent rebellion. His works fetch stratospheric prices at auctions, peaking at €16.8 million in 2017 for Untitled (S III Released to France Face 43.14). But don’t be fooled—Grotjahn is no surface-level rebel. He is deeply rooted in a pictorial tradition that he pushes to its ultimate limits.
This duality between tradition and innovation is particularly visible in how he treats the pictorial surface. Layers of paint accumulate like geological strata, creating a complex topography reminiscent of the rugged reliefs of the Rocky Mountains. One could see this as a metaphor for the history of painting itself—each layer representing a new attempt to push the boundaries of the medium.
If some critics see his work as merely a continuation of late modernism, they miss the point. Grotjahn doesn’t just recycle past forms—he digests and transforms them into something radically new. It’s what Roland Barthes called “the degree zero of writing”, applied here to painting: an attempt to create a visual language that escapes conventions while acknowledging them.
His creative process is just as fascinating as the final result. He works obsessively, spending hours applying and scraping paint, creating surfaces that seem to have their own life. This approach recalls Gilles Deleuze’s writings on Francis Bacon—the idea that painting must capture the invisible forces coursing through the body.
The “Face Paintings” in particular reveal a constant tension between order and chaos. Faces emerge from layers of paint like specters, both present and absent. It’s as if Grotjahn seeks to capture the precise moment when the figure emerges from abstraction—or perhaps the reverse, when it dissolves back into it.
This deliberate ambiguity is at the heart of his practice. While many contemporary artists strive to impose a clear message, Grotjahn prefers to cultivate uncertainty. His works resist easy interpretation, forcing the viewer to actively engage in the process of creating meaning.
There’s something profoundly American about this approach—a sort of pictorial pragmatism that recalls William James’s writings on direct experience. Grotjahn doesn’t get lost in abstract theories; he explores the physical possibilities of his medium directly.
But behind this apparent spontaneity lies deep reflection on the very nature of painting. Every gesture, every color choice is the result of years of experimentation and research. It’s what Michel Foucault might have called an “archaeology of pictorial knowledge”.
Mark Grotjahn’s work reminds us that painting is not dead, contrary to what some would have us believe. It is alive, pulsating, even dangerous. Grotjahn maintains a practice that is both deeply serious and radically experimental.
He is not just painting pictures—he is redefining what painting can be in the 21st century. And while some continue to debate the relevance of abstract painting in our digital world, Grotjahn quietly pushes the boundaries of what is possible with paint on a flat surface.
His work reminds us that art is not a polite decorative activity meant to brighten the walls of bourgeois apartments. It is a brutal confrontation with matter, a constant struggle to wrest meaning from chaos. And in this struggle, Grotjahn reveals himself as one of the fiercest and most determined fighters of his generation.