Dennis Hollingsworth

Mark Grotjahn, BadAss.

Henry and I visited the Mark Grotjahn solo show at Blum and Poe Gallery in Culver City in the last week before the show came down. Grotjahn has always been impressive and now even more so since his work has taken a turn... a huge shift in what is popularly known as a change in practice from abstraction to figuration. But then one could make an argument that his painterly language has been nearly the same, that it is just that his formalistic rigor has been unbound. The inside scoop is that he has always begun his work with figuration (faces, I think) and during his previous epoch, he was overlaying his signature ray shots over, eventually obliterating or concealing what might be called portraiture. (You can check out his earlier work here.)

I think that even in his geometric abstractions, he implied facial/bodily imagistics with a slight dislocation, a kind of contrapposto, the eventual migration of bilateral symmetry that moves from godly perfection to the all too human. Another indication of figuration.

All that is cool, but what really punches me in the gut about this show is the material bad-assed-ness of it all. One, two, three, four dimensions of paint handling... but not much more. Brushes, maybe palette knives, card board... cardboard!.... glued onto linen strung over stretcher bars and sliced and torn away. Hatches and lines, lines layered like his earlier work, providing continuity. Some say they see Picasso, others Klee. His name is signed into the lower right hand corner and repeated over and over along the edges, buried and exhumed on the flatlands. His name sprayed like a wild dog marking his territory. There's a kind of recursiveness in how his themes and facture fold in on itself, compounding itself until the layers stack up like a fugue.

A fugue that can handle itself in a bar fight, that is.

This show was simultaneously an inspiration and a challenge. It's what one hopes for when you haul ass out over a city like LA, looking at a sea of art that tends to look too much like everything else. A show like this summons the urgent need to get back in the studio post haste, that strange feeling of simultaneously wanting to stay and soak it up and get your butt out of there, back into the studio and get to work.

For a conventional view of the exhibition, click here to view installation views and individual paintings in the show. This blogpost is for my friends who couldn't get to the show, nearly thirty details in the pop up images tiled thumbnails below.

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