Mark Grotjahn: Painted Sculpture, Hardcover

Contributor(s):

• Created by: Mark Grotjahn

In a radical act of transformation, Mark Grotjahn (b. Pasadena, 1968; lives and works in Los Angeles) turns an ordinary wobbly cardboard box into a precious and solid work of art: a bronze sculpture on a pedestal. With rough cutouts for mouths and eyes, cardboard rolls for noses, and corrugated surfaces, the assemblages recall primitive infantile masks. Grotjahn casts them in bronze and then paints them in a gestural expressive style with streaks of bright oil paint. Set on pinewood bases, the masks are paintings and threedimensional objects at once: not just mere combinations of two techniques but genuine hybrids, neverbeforeseen chimeras. They enrich the genealogy of modern art, and of painted sculpture more particularly, with a new facet, engaging the modernist ideas of found object, assemblage, and welded sculpture in dialogue and harking back to the masks and sculptures of classical modernism inspired by non Western art. With an essay by Mark Prince.