[from the pressrelease]
The ‘Kitchen Drawings’ originate from the ‘Butterfly’ compositions, which Grotjahn has made since 2001. Conceived as one work, the series originated from a single composition created to hang in Grotjahn’s kitchen in his home. With the first drawn in black and cream pencil on a sheet of paper, the subsequent works in the series followed on from one another in chromatic pairs. Some of these are more tonal, while others explore radiating, almost complementary colours. Hung precisely to the artist’s specifications, they form a prismatic display. While the individual works are reminiscent of Op art painters, they invite movement from the viewer, more in line with the Kinetic artists of the 1970s. Impossible to view as a whole at any given moment, the works appear to shift and change, pulsating beneath the viewer’s gaze. Resulting in multiple points of view through space, as well as in motion, the different serial elements play off one another. In addition to movement, both light and the differing hues which result from the sun’s changing intensity play an important role. In this way, the work is as much comprised of the paper and coloured pencils from which the independent drawings are executed, as the viewer’s own temporal and wavering perception.

This time-based element corresponds to the succession in which Grotjahn’s individual compositions are made: drawn one on top of the other on the artist’s table, each new drawing seamlessly incorporates residual traces from earlier works. Michael Govan, director of the LACMA, likens this sense of flow to ‘the residue of our life events of one year, [which] may become the ground of the next. The color of each one of our years is distinctive but somehow related to one another in ways that aren’t systematic even though our day to day rituals may be repetitive. The small unexpected interruptions, messy bits, and mistakes of our lives remain inscribed in our memory. We draw around them to fill in a picture of our experience.’

Colour, form, space, movement and time thus combine to form force-fields which are not unlike the polyphony of music. Tension fields and quiet movements supersede one another as the viewer turns to look at the successive drawings in the exhibition space.