MARK GROTJAHN: OUT OF COUNTRY

Gagosian is pleased to announce “Out of Country”, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Mark Grotjahn at the gallery’s 980 Madison Avenue location in New York.

September 10 – October 19, 2024

In his paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, Grotjahn investigates color, perspective, seriality, and the sublime. The concluding entries in the “Backcountry” series featured in this exhibition see him again draw inspiration from the experience of rural American landscapes, specifically those from his ski and fly-fishing tours in the remote backcountry of western Colorado.

The richly expressive paintings in “Out of Country” are dominated by Grotjahn’s broken arcs and partial ellipses—as well as by his bold red, yellow, green, and blue coloration—and the centers of their weblike compositions tend to be more densely active than the edges and corners.

The artist further disrupts the surfaces with “slugs,” small rolls of paint created from excess impasto. But while still suggestive of an abstracted signature, these additions are applied more sparsely, signaling a shift away from their previously gridlike arrangement and toward a more camouflaged embedding

In these final paintings of the series, Grotjahn continues his use of structural and gestural strategies rooted in Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism on a robust scale creating a direct, visceral relationship to the form.

Through this process he is able to convey a sense of awe of the natural world and an impression of his own discrete experience within it.