VGrotfeldt

Virgil Grotfeldt: An Introduction

I've been following the art of Virgil Grotfeldt for the past fifteen years, as it turns out, the period of his mature achievements. The first works I saw were the acrylic and bronze powder paintings—canvas and heavy paper, the latter sometimes torn into freeform shapes. These dark paintings invariably gave rise to mysterious human and animal figures. After visiting the artist's studio, I queried him about whom he admired historically. I was surprised by his reply. He stated his high regard for Odilon Redon, the great French symbolist of the later 19th and early 20th century. I had never heard an artist of my time mention Redon. Redon's art most relevant to Grotfeldt's contemporary works are his fluid and mysterious evocations in pastel drawings and mysterious black lithographs.

Similarly, around 1975 Grotfeldt saw his first reproductions of the work of the great French novelist and artist of the 19th century, Victor Hugo. Hugo's art, exclusively drawings, is very rare and almost entirely owned by a foundation in France. Abstract evocations of nature, the Hugo drawings are unprecedented for their time.

Grotfeldt's art is rooted in the 20th century tradition of biomorphic abstraction. This is the art that depicts various animal and plant forms in ways that are related to or suggestive of forms in nature but in no way a literal depiction. The first practitioner of this art was the Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky. In a series of extraordinary paintings and watercolors done around 1911 to 1920, Kandinsky did brightly hued (yellow, red, green, etc.) and freely flowing forms, works pioneering this biomorphism. Many of his larger works of this type he called improvisations, Improvision I, II, etc. He also did a set called the Four Seasons. Kandinsky's pioneering biomorphic art prefigures what Grotfeldt has achieved in that many of the forms are modeled and given a three-dimensional quality.

In the 1920s, the great surrealist Max Ernst, having moved on from Dada, invented a technique called frotage. This involved developing forms that looked biomorphic by finding textured surfaces, placing a piece of paper or canvas upon them, and then rubbing the surface with charcoal or graphite to derive an image. Shifting the paper about, he was able to generate an unusual and provocative body of work derived by this frotage technique. These forms became seminal to much of the surrealist art in the 1930s when fantastic nature themes were important to the genre.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the American artist Jackson Pollock began an unprecedented series of spontaneously generated small drawings involving biomorphic form, often in watercolor, pen and ink, and so on. It remains one of the great moments in American art even as these works are small. They exist separate from his more famous paintings of the period, such as The She Wolf, or Male and Female, etc. By the late forties, when Pollock is pouring skeins of paint for such paintings as Autumn Rhythm or Lavender Mist nature remains a major theme in his art.

Pollock's early pursuit of biomorphic abstraction also exists in the late work of the American artist, Arshile Gorky, whose life was tragically cut short. In paintings and extraordinary drawings admired by the leader of the French surrealist movement, André Breton, Gorky made agonizingly beautiful works in biomorphic form. The drawings are linear with sparse areas of color and sometimes they are just black line work on paper.

Following World War II, one of the greatest of the new artists of Europe, was the German, Joseph Beuys. Besides his sculpture and performance pieces, Beuys is famous for an extraordinary body of drawings. They depict animal and human forms that are deliberately simple, almost primitivistic in style. Of all of Beuys' works, it is perhaps the drawings that have the greatest poignancy. At the Dusseldorf Academy, there were a great many younger German artists who, like Grotfeldt, were influenced by Beuys' teachings and his art. Not surprisingly Beuys was discharged from the academy for his radical belief that art should lead the way to form a non-hierarchical society.

A technique employed by Grotfeldt, specifically in his painted works on paper, has been the conceptual introduction of the issue of time. Grotfeldt has chosen antique sheets of ledger pages, narrative writing, and maps, particularly nautical charts, to serve as the ground on which he creates his aqueous shapes, exploring the details of the underlying support, which has been cropped for its own sake and has influenced the artist as he develops his composition.

In 1987, Grotfeldt had an exhibition at Gallerie Theeboom in Amsterdam. While there, he met the Dutch artist Waldo Bien, who had been a student of Beuys in his final period at the Dusseldorf Academy. The friendship quickly developed and collaborations between Grotfeldt and Bien have continued over the years since. At this first encounter, Grotfeldt received coal dust residue that Bien derived from sanding a huge block of coal for his work The Deathroom Interior. From this initial coal powder, Grotfeldt derived an extraordinary painting and drawing medium. The coal dust is suspended in an aqueous-based acrylic medium, which can be drawn and brushed to conceive extraordinary biomorphic forms. This medium for Grotfeldt allows for a degree of modeling and three-dimensional aspects to his art that is unique. Grotfeldt's more celebrated contemporaries who work in biomorphic form such as the artist Terry Winters or in the case of the late work of Brice Marden, the art is graphic and figure ground. There is no sense of dimensional modeling to the forms.

Not since the early Pollock or the late Arshile Gorky have I seen the dimensionally modeled forms as in the biomorphic abstraction of Virgil Grotfeldt. Nature and abstract form define Grotfeldt's art as well as sustain its value as a personal meditation upon essential life forces.

Walter Hopps