Events
Fundraiser
Artist Plate Project 2022
Coalition for the Homeless
Launching May 22, 2023, 10am edt
Limited-edition bone china plates produced by Prospect and featuring artwork by more than forty artists—including Virgil Abloh, Derrick Adams, Harold Ancart, Georg Baselitz, Amoako Boafo, Mark Grotjahn, Takashi Murakami, Albert Oehlen, Ed Ruscha, Anna Weyant, and Jonas Wood—will be sold through Artware Editions to raise funds for the Coalition’s lifesaving programs. The funds raised by the sale of the plates will provide food, crisis services, housing, and other critical aid to thousands of people experiencing homelessness and instability. The purchase of one plate can feed one hundred homeless and hungry New Yorkers.
Takashi Murakami, Gargantua on Your Palm, 2018 © 2018 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved
In Conversation
Mark Grotjahn
Andrew Fabricant
Monday, October 10, 2022, 6:15pm
Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London
Join Gagosian for a conversation between Mark Grotjahn and Andrew Fabricant, the gallery’s chief operating officer, on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition Backcountry at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London. The pair will discuss Grotjahn’s long-standing exploration of the formal and expressive possibilities of paint, his ongoing experimentation with abstract mark making, and events in his professional and personal life that have informed the new works on view.
Mark Grotjahn in his studio, Los Angeles, 2022. Artwork © Mark Grotjahn
Support
The Kitchen
Ice and Fire: A Benefit Exhibition in Three Parts
October 15, 2020–March 23, 2021
The benefit exhibition Ice and Fire features works by more than forty artists who have enduring relationships with the Kitchen in New York. Installed within the organization’s three-story space in Chelsea, which is currently closed due to the global pandemic, the three-part exhibition is viewable online. Proceeds from sales will go toward a planned renovation on the occasion of the Kitchen’s fiftieth anniversary, ensuring that the nonprofit space will remain a platform for artistic experimentation in its historic and beloved building. Work by Cecily Brown, Roe Ethridge, Mark Grotjahn, Alex Israel, Ed Ruscha, Taryn Simon, Mary Weatherford, and Christopher Wool is included.
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Capri 53.57), 2020 © Mark Grotjahn
Online Reading
Mark Grotjahn
Casa Malaparte
Mark Grotjahn: Casa Malaparte is available for online reading from May 27 through June 26 as part of Artist Spotlight: Mark Grotjahn. The book documents a presentation of paintings and sculptures by the artist at the landmark modernist house designed by writer Curzio Malaparte on the Italian island of Capri. The exhibition marked the first presentation of Grotjahn’s Capri paintings.
Mark Grotjahn: Casa Malaparte (New York: Gagosian, 2017)
Announcements
Video
Virtual Studio Visits
Klaus Biesenbach in Conversation with Mark Grotjahn
In the Virtual Studio Visits series from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, director Klaus Biesenbach digitally connects with artists around the world. Here, he speaks with Mark Grotjahn in his Los Angeles studio during a visit recorded in late April 2020. Together they discuss life under lockdown and Grotjahn’s work, from his student days to the present.
Still from “Virtual Studio Visits: Klaus Biesenbach in Conversation with Mark Grotjahn”
Video
Artists on Art
Mark Grotjahn on John McLaughlin
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Artists on Art video series features contemporary artists speaking on objects of their choice from the museum’s collection. In this video, Mark Grotjahn explains what draws him to #26 (1961) by the American abstract painter John McLaughlin (1898–1976). Describing McLaughlin’s practice of setting up parameters and finding possibilities within them, Grotjahn also discusses his own experience of making geometric abstractions and the joy of “losing yourself into that void.”
Still from “Artists on Art: Mark Grotjahn on John McLaughlin”
Museum Exhibitions
Closed
A Dark Hymn
Highlights from the Hill Collection
March 1–April 13, 2024
Hill Art Foundation, New York
hillartfoundation.org
A Dark Hymn celebrates the five-year anniversary of the Hill Art Foundation by examining the collection through the lens of Valentin Bousch’s sixteenth-century stained glass window, The Creation and the Expulsion from Paradise (1533), which is permanently installed in the foundation’s Chelsea building. The exhibition places work from the four major categories of the collection—Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, old master paintings, canvases and sculptures by modern masters, and contemporary art—in dialogue with the window. Work by Willem de Kooning, Mark Grotjahn, Albert Oehlen, Ed Ruscha, Rudolf Stingel, Sarah Sze, and Christopher Wool is included.
Installation view, A Dark Hymn: Highlights from the Hill Collection, Hill Art Foundation, New York, March 1–April 13, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Ed Ruscha, © Robert Gober, © Caroline Kent, © Sarah Sze. Photo: Matthew Herrmann
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Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog)
November 18, 2023–April 7, 2024
The Broad, Los Angeles
www.thebroad.org
Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog) is drawn entirely from the Broad collection and showcases works by Los Angeles–based artists. Titled after a work by John Baldessari, the exhibition includes reflections on Los Angeles as a city in flux and turmoil, and on societal issues that extend far beyond the city. Featuring more than sixty works made from 1969 to 2023, it brings together photorealistic painting, photography, sculpture, and political signage by twenty-one artists across varying generations. Work by Mark Grotjahn, Alex Israel, Ed Ruscha, and Jonas Wood is included.
Ed Ruscha, Honey . . . . I Twisted Through More Damned Traffic to Get Here, 1984, The Broad, Los Angeles © Ed Ruscha
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The Milton and Sheila Fine Collection
November 18, 2023–March 17, 2024
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
carnegieart.org
Milton and Sheila Fine have been longtime advocates and supporters of the arts in their philanthropy throughout the Pittsburgh region. Promised to Carnegie Museum of Art in 2015, their collection of contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, and drawing reflects their interest in American and German art from the 1980s to the 2000s. This exhibition, which is presented as a celebration and remembrance of Milton Fine, who passed away in 2019, foregrounds the importance and impact of the gift. Work by Richard Artschwager, Georg Baselitz, Mark Grotjahn, Donald Judd, Brice Marden, David Reed, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Jeff Wall, and Christopher Wool is included.
Ed Ruscha, Victory, 1987, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh © Ed Ruscha
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Ecstatic
Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection
June 10–August 27, 2023
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
hammer.ucla.edu
Presented in conjunction with the unveiling of the Hammer’s building expansion, Ecstatic highlights acquisitions made since 2005—the year the institution began collecting contemporary art. The exhibition is organized around two distinct installations of sculpture and works on paper that emphasize the role each medium plays within the scope of the museum’s collection. Work by Mark Grotjahn, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Jim Shaw is included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Someday, 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Jeff McLane
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Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained
April 21–July 21, 2023
Hill Art Foundation, New York
hillartfoundation.org
Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained is an exhibition curated by David Salle that brings together paintings and sculptures by artists working across different eras, mediums, and geographies to explore the notion of affinity between works of art. Alongside a painting by Salle from 1988, work by Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Mark Grotjahn, Brice Marden, Albert Oehlen, Pablo Picasso, Cy Twombly, and Christopher Wool is included.
Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 1990 © Albert Oehlen
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Mark Grotjahn
50 Kitchens
May 20–August 19, 2018
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
www.lacma.org
Conceived as one work, Mark Grotjahn’s 50 Kitchens (2013–18) takes its inspiration from a single Butterfly composition that Grotjahn made to meet the dimensional specifications of a wall in his kitchen. The more than fifty subsequent chromatic drawings explore pairs of radiating colors and together create a prismatic display. Grotjahn began making his Butterfly compositions in 2001. This exhibition was the first presentation of 50 Kitchens at LACMA.
Installation view, Mark Grotjahn: 50 Kitchens, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, May 20–August 19, 2018. Artwork © Mark Grotjahn. Photo: Museum Associates/LACMA
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The Forever Now
Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World
December 14, 2014–April 5, 2015
Museum of Modern Art, New York
www.moma.org
Forever Now presents the work of seventeen artists whose paintings reflect a singular approach that characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of the new millennium: they refuse to allow us to define or even meter our time by them. They represent a wide variety of styles and impulses, but all use the painted surface as a platform, map, or metaphoric screen on which genres intermingle, morph, and collide. Work by Joe Bradley, Mark Grotjahn, and Mary Weatherford is included.
Mary Weatherford, la noche, 2014 © Mary Weatherford. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio
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Mark Grotjahn
Sculpture
May 31–August 17, 2014
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
www.nashersculpturecenter.org
This exhibition was the first dedicated museum presentation of Mark Grotjahn’s sculpture, which the artist began producing privately in 2000, alongside his painting practice. It showcased many never-before-seen, three-dimensional works, ranging in size from small, intimate compositions to larger-scale freestanding works. Combining common cardboard boxes and tubes and cutting them to roughly resemble masks or faces, Grotjahn then scraped these assemblages and cast them in bronze, which he either left raw or elaborately painted.
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Scribble Scrabble French Mask M31.b), 2013 © Mark Grotjahn
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Mark Grotjahn
Circus Circus
May 16–July 27, 2014
Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany
www.kunstvereinfreiburg.de
Circus Circus was Mark Grotjahn’s first solo exhibition in Germany. Both adopting and commenting on a range of art historical influences, from Renaissance-era drawing technique to Abstract Expressionism and Op art, the works on view demonstrated the artist’s ability to combine the opposing modes of abstraction and figuration. The presentation included a new series of large-scale paintings.
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Circus No. 2 Face 44.19), 2013 © Mark Grotjahn
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Mark Grotjahn
February 17–April 29, 2012
Aspen Art Museum, Colorado
www.aspenartmuseum.org
Featuring work produced from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, this exhibition was Mark Grotjahn’s first comprehensive museum survey in the United States. The presentation included paintings from his Perspective and Butterfly series that explore the constructs of dual and multi-point perspective, as well as from his expressive and anthropomorphic Face series. Five Mask sculptures were also on view, on the grounds of the museum and on four nearby ski mountains.
Installation view, Mark Grotjahn, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, February 17–April 29, 2012. Artwork © Mark Grotjahn