Mark Grotjahn: Skulls

A painterly meditation on corporality and mentality, infused with Post-Impressionist influences In 2016, American painter Mark Grotjahn (born 1968) began a series of intimately scaled, thickly impastoed skulls. Made with brushes rather than his historically favored palette knife, these paintings affirm the influence of Post-Impressionists on the artist. After 15 years of Face Paintings and more than 100 Mask Sculptures , Grotjahn has stripped back the disguise and the skin and arrived at the 22 bones that structure the human visage. By introducing a symbol of life's inevitable end into his visual vocabulary, Grotjahn sets his sights on his own corporeality. As a result, the Skulls are his most intimate paintings to date. This catalog presents the entirety of his series, alongside a singular essay by Alison M. Gingeras in which she posits that the skull is the origin of portraiture, charting the motif's emergence throughout art history.