With the dramatic blow of radiating, hypnotic drawings, hungry
souls will not go hungry. Vibrant, splintered lollipop shades
radiate outward from a central vertical stripe and strike with a
meditative power.
This is Mark Grotjahn’s work ““ he has fulfilled his
goal of creating vivacious harmony in art.
“The work should bounce, the work should have that art
buzz,” said Grotjahn.
Through April 17, the Los Angles artist’s drawings will be
featured as a Hammer Projects exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum.
In the exhibition, a flow of hypnotic monochromatic and
multicolored drawings will be on display.
The Hammer Projects give emerging or under-recognized artists
the opportunity to create new works or present existing work in a
new experimental context. The show was a great motivation for
Grotjahn to start pushing himself into a new territory, and he
created seven new large-scale pieces exclusively for the
exhibition. He wanted the room to feel a certain way.
“With this work, it should work great and it should feel
great,” he said.
The Hammer Projects focus mainly on emerging or lesser-known
artists, but also mix in artists at different stages in their
careers. Grotjahn is not a new artist, but to the nation, he is
still under the radar. Because the Hammer Museum thought
Grotjahn’s work deserved to be seen, there was an urgency to
facilitate the exhibition, even though the artist’s work is
better known than the focus of many other Projects. With the
varying level of artistic renown, the Projects series carries more
weight and retains its innovation.
“Mark adds to the Project series in a fresh way; it adds
to the Hammer Museum in a fresh way,” said James Elaine,
curator of Hammer Projects.
In the museum system in Los Angeles, an experimental forum for
emerging artists has not fully existed. The Projects are hugely
important not only to the L.A. art community, but to the larger
audience outside the art world as well. Elaine hopes the Projects
will give artists the chance to do something they either
can’t do on their own or can’t do in their
galleries.
“One of the great things about the Projects is that they
give young artists the chance to have a solo museum show, to do
something high-profile and experimental at the same time,”
Grotjahn said.
For Grotjahn, meditation is a by-product of the repetition of
his geometric abstractions. Although he craves a piece to work on
on the wall, the repetitious nature of drawing seduces the artist
to really focus and this, in turn, brings him peace.
“When I am making the drawings, it’s meditative.
When I make the geometric drawings, there’s a certain kind of
ritualized labor that makes me meditative,” Grotjahn said
while drawing green doodles on a worn envelope. “People seem
to experience the work in a certain meditative state, and it
references these types of feelings.”
Like the artist, the viewer too becomes entranced by the
hypnotic drawings. Colorful butterflies flutter with the
imagination, and remnants of ashes and brokenness hold the eye to
the vibrancy. Like the contrasting elements of black and white in
the exhibition, the works seem very beautiful and simple, but as
the eye is pulled deeper into the canvas, there is a meditative
reaction. The nature of these perspective pieces confront the
viewer with an inner vivacity and spirituality.
“Art is worthless and priceless at the same time,”
Elaine said. “It is about life and changing your perspective
on the world situation. We’ve commodified art, but the soul
of art is intangible and it’s really about life
itself.”
Although the artist himself may or may not have specific
intentions, in the end, observers will bring their own views and
experiences and the art will infuse and feed their own lives.
“Art has a life of its own; once you frame it and put it
on the wall, it becomes its own nation, its own person, its own
identity apart from the artist, and people start bringing to it
their versions,” Elaine said.