The Kunstmuseum Thun is the first institution in Europe to present a comprehensive solo exhibition of the American painter Mark Grotjahn (b. 1968, Pasadena, California). Grotjahn studied painting and sculpture at the universities of California and Colorado before settling in Los Angeles, where he has consistently pursued a distinctive and ambitious style of painting since the mid-1990s. Whilst Grotjahn is regarded in America as one of the leading figures of a younger generation of painters and has exhibited at major institutions such as the Whitney Museum in New York and the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, he remains relatively unknown in Europe.
In his paintings and drawings, pictorial ideas recur in variations and, through a reduced formal language, delineate the artist’s field of interest. At the centre are the Butterfly Paintings and Drawings, characterised by their radiating appearance: fine, tonally graded lines in a dense, impasto layer of paint converge like veins towards a point in the centre of the picture. They evoke in the viewer a range of painting traditions from modernist art movements: conceived in a strictly formalist manner, they are reminiscent of colour-field painting or works of Abstract Expressionism from the 1950s. The spiral form immediately invites a mental connection with elements of pop culture and the everyday world. Associations with wheels, propellers and optical, kaleidoscopic effects are triggered, while sunsets and endless highways from road movies are brought to mind. In a playful manner, a paradox is thereby suspended: using the rules of spatial perspective, Grotjahn generates abstract compositions, whilst employing the conventions of non-figurative painting to create spatial dimensions.
The exhibition in Thun showcases the two poles of Grotjahn’s oeuvre: a figurative, at times childlike visual language alongside vividly coloured, abstract compositions that fill the exhibition space with a powerful presence and, in an almost metaphysical way, invite a contemplative engagement with the work. A tension is created between analytical structure and a simultaneously irrational effect, thereby making the convergence of abstraction and figuration tangible.
