Untitled (three-tiered perspective), 1997

In Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (three-tiered perspective), colored rays converge at a point along the horizon in each of the three vertically-stacked, rectangular sections of the painting. This repeated design scheme refers to one-point perspective, a technique developed in the fifteenth century, during the Italian Renaissance, for depicting three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface by plotting orthogonal lines that recede toward a single vanishing point. However, Grotjahn uses this fundamental tenet of realistic painting in order to make an abstract image.