Mark Grotjahn at Casa Malaparte
This book was published on the occasion of Mark Grotjahn at Casa Malaparte, a one-night-only exhibition in July 2016 at Casa Malaparte, the famous cliffside house built on the Italian island of Capri by Curzio Malaparte (the pseudonym of Kurt Erich Suckert), a provocative writer, editor, and intellectual active in the Italian literary and artistic avant-garde. This icon of modernist architecture, designed in 1938 and famously featured in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt), served as a dramatic setting for the first presentation of Grotjahn’s Capri paintings, alongside three bronze sculptures. The paintings signaled a pivotal new direction for the artist. Moving beyond the representational qualities of his Face paintings (2003–) and introducing a greater spontaneity to his process, these abstractions use multilayered arcs to explore the mutability of their medium.
The book reproduces all of the works in the exhibition, together with installation photography that documents their relationship to the site’s unique architecture and environment. It also features an essay by Alain Elkann and texts by Malaparte and Renato Guttuso from a 1942 issue of Malaparte’s magazine Prospettive, published in English for the first time.
Publisher: Gagosian
Publication date: 2017
Contributors: Alain Elkann, Renato Guttuso, Curzio Malaparte
Designer: Goto Design, New York
Printer: Shapco Printing, Minneapolis
Format: Cloth hardcover
Dimensions: 12 × 10 inches (30.5 × 25.4 cm)
Pages: 96
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-938748-38-7
