LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Hammer Museum presents three concurrent Hammer Projects exhibitions showcasing emerging artists from the U.S. and Asia—Mark Grotjahn from Los Angeles, Adam Cvijanovic from New York, and Hiraki Sawa from Japan. The exhibitions present three distinct explorations of specific media, including Grotjahn’s large-scale color pencil drawings, Cvijanovic’s mural-size acrylic painting spanning the extensive Hammer lobby wall, and Sawa’s black-and-white video of miniaturized airplanes.

Hammer Projects are a series of exhibitions that focus primarily on the work of emerging artists, and reflect the Museum’s commitment to contemporary art by providing international and local artists a laboratory-like environment to create new work, or to present existing work in a new context. Hammer Projects are curated by James Elaine.

Mark Grotjahn: Drawings, through April 17, 2005 - Known primarily for his bold geometric paintings, Los Angeles-based artist Mark Grotjahn presents a group of seven new, large-scale drawings. Installed in the Museum’s Vault Gallery, the works are meticulous multi-colored as well as monochromatic colored pencil drawings on paper. The formal compositions employ various one-point perspectives that radiate and converge, mimicking the shapes of butterflies, flowers, and water. The elegance of Grotjahn’s large sheets is subverted by deliberate scuffs and markings that add important elements to the compositions.

Mark Grotjahn was born in 1968 in Pasadena, California, and currently lives in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Recent solo exhibitions include Mark Grotjahn: El gran burrito at Boom, Chicago, and shows at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the London Institute Gallery and is on view in the Fifty-fourth Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, until March 2005.