Grotjahn's Dancing Black Butterflies originally installed at Gagosian

Definitely head over to the Portland Art Museum asap, we finally have a Marc Grotjahn exhibition in town. (fellow triangle enthusiasts ...triangulate?)

Now on view in the fourth-floor Miller-Meigs galleries of the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, the exhibition of Mark Grotjahn's Untitled (Dancing Black Butterflies) is presented in conjunction with the Museum's Summer of Drawing (along with Sol LeWitt, works from the Crocker and R. Crumb). Exciting to have such programmatic coherence...

Grotjahn's work on view is a drawing in nine parts that takes his recurring preoccupation with "the butterfly" to its formal and historical limits. It's an elegant work of subtly shifting abstract forms that showcases Grotjahn's remarkable handling of colored pencil and his formal experimentation within the history of abstraction and perception. The drawings' complex, skewed angles carry the eye from sheet to sheet around the room in a manner suggestive of musical notation, dance and deconstructionist architecture.

Frankly, I was becoming concerned about when the Miller-Meigs series of endowed exhibitions would restart (after a short post Twombly breather) as it has been the most consistently interesting program of exhibitions in Portland (Ed Ruscha, Roxy Paine, Damien Hirst, Pierre Huyghe, Cy Twombly) since its inception in 2005. Needless to say it's back. It is doubly nice to be able to see both Sol LeWitt and Grotjahn in one visit to the Portland Art Museum.

On view through October 17th.

What about the APEX? Under Gately's direction the series introduced underserved regional art into the museum.