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Mark Grotjahn — Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective)
Mark Grotjahn

Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective)

1998

Completed in 1998 and rendered entirely in colored pencil on paper, this work belongs to Mark Grotjahn's celebrated Perspective series, a body of work that established the artist's reputation for transforming rigorous conceptual inquiry into objects of genuine optical intensity. The composition deploys multiple vanishing points arranged across three tiers, generating radiating fields of line that simultaneously converge and expand across the picture plane. Where Renaissance convention subordinated perspective to the service of illusionistic space, Grotjahn turns the mechanism back on itself, making perspectival structure the subject rather than the tool. The result is a work that feels at once systematic and sensory, its geometry inseparable from the accumulated pressure of the artist's hand. The medium is central to the work's meaning and effect. Colored pencil demands an exceptional commitment of time and physical attention, and the density achieved here across a 61 by 48.3 centimeter sheet speaks to the deliberate, almost meditative labor Grotjahn described as intrinsic to this period of practice. Each stratum of the composition holds its own chromatic logic while contributing to the larger visual field, so that the eye moves between local incident and total structure in continuous oscillation. This interplay between part and whole, between control and perceptual release, is precisely what makes the Perspective works so enduringly compelling. Works from this series on paper are considerably rarer on the market than Grotjahn's large-scale painted canvases, and examples from the late 1990s carry particular historical weight as documents of the moment the artist committed to the motif that would define his subsequent career. The work is signed and offered in good condition, presenting a focused and unusually intimate entry point into one of the most intellectually coherent bodies of work in contemporary American abstraction.

Medium
Colored pencil on paper
Overall
Signed
Yes

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About this work

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective), 1998

Completed in 1998 and rendered entirely in colored pencil on paper, this work belongs to Mark Grotjahn's celebrated Perspective series, a body of work that established the artist's reputation for transforming rigorous conceptual inquiry into objects of genuine optical intensity. The composition deploys multiple vanishing points arranged across three tiers, generating radiating fields of line that simultaneously converge and expand across the picture plane. Where Renaissance convention subordinated perspective to the service of illusionistic space, Grotjahn turns the mechanism back on itself, making perspectival structure the subject rather than the tool. The result is a work that feels at once systematic and sensory, its geometry inseparable from the accumulated pressure of the artist's hand. The medium is central to the work's meaning and effect. Colored pencil demands an exceptional commitment of time and physical attention, and the density achieved here across a 61 by 48.3 centimeter sheet speaks to the deliberate, almost meditative labor Grotjahn described as intrinsic to this period of practice. Each stratum of the composition holds its own chromatic logic while contributing to the larger visual field, so that the eye moves between local incident and total structure in continuous oscillation. This interplay between part and whole, between control and perceptual release, is precisely what makes the Perspective works so enduringly compelling. Works from this series on paper are considerably rarer on the market than Grotjahn's large-scale painted canvases, and examples from the late 1990s carry particular historical weight as documents of the moment the artist committed to the motif that would define his subsequent career. The work is signed and offered in good condition, presenting a focused and unusually intimate entry point into one of the most intellectually coherent bodies of work in contemporary American abstraction.

Medium
Colored pencil on paper
Dimensions
overall: 61 x 48.3 cm
Year
1998
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
Sotheby's: Contemporary Art Day Auction

Related themes

Mohn Art Collective

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Collected by

Alex Capecelatro