Mark Grotjahn (b. Pasadena, 1968; lives and works in Los Angeles) ranks among the bestknown American painters of his generation. His heterogeneous oeu vre includes depictions of anthropomorphic plants and masks as well as co lorful abstract compositions in oil or wax crayon. After 1997, he also produced numerous monochromes. Grotjahn’s Butterfly and Face paintings are ani mated by a dynamic dialectic between gestural representation and formalist structure. The lavishly designed book Circus Circus presents a selection of paintings from Grotjahn’s new Circus series as well as a Mask bronze sculp ture. The ambitious polychromatic works combine the geometric rigor of the Butterfly series with the gestural facture of the Face pictures, in which pri mary facial symbols emerge from flowing streams of color. The essays by Caroline Kading and Mark Prince analyze the Circus series in light of the painterly traditions on which it draws and examine its place in Grotjahn’s oeuvre.