Mark Grotjahn (b. 1968)

Mark Grotjahn's Butterfly Paintings are the artist's most celebrated works to date. Deriving from the artist's fascination with signs and retro graphics, these works which essentially consist of a radiating sequence of parallel lines are executed in thick oil in such a way that an illusion of perspective is generated by the painting's butterfly form.

Built up steadily in a sequence of opaque layers and heavy texture,
Grotjahn's paintings bridge the worlds of abstract painting and amateur sign-making. This amateurish aspect of the work is wholly intentional with the radiating angular patterns of the design's perspectival wings always painted slightly off-kilter so that an uneasy but fascinating tension is established at the heart of the work. Rendered in rich deep tones of colour, the paintings evoke a strangely artificial world of adolescent dreaming. This quality is augmented by the clear emphasis on the hand-made nature of these works and by the often garish addition to them of the artist's hand-drawn monogrammatic signature and date.