This otherworldliness extends beyond the ecumenical Martin’s work, simply comprised of delicately drawn grids, connected the canvas to nature. Simon Evans uses yoga mats as canvas, transforming the exercise and meditation aids into backdrops for meticulous gridded mazes of black ink and white-out. From afar, the linked panels appear like colorful blocks in a painting closer inspection reveals the prosaic parts. Elias Sime uses this basic, accessible structure to organize panels overlaid with found materials: braided, reclaimed electrical wires and components. The grid offers very different possibilities for artists working with unusual media. Instead, she developed a gridded system of painting that allowed her to start and stop production at will: The constraints she developed offered a path for continued mark-making. When Grabner made her gingham-patterned Untitled (2016) (now on view in the James Cohan show), she was a working mother she didn’t have the liberty to spend uninterrupted hours in the studio. Yet the grid can also give way to greater freedom in more obscure ways. Tompkins portrays process-both sexual and artistic-with a pervasive honesty. Sometimes, particularly in her drawings, she left the gridded framework visible. Betty Tompkins’s paintings from the same era followed a similar strategy, one that she continues to employ through the current day: The artist enlarges explicit photographs on a massive, painterly scale. Wright’s inclusion connected the grid to architecture, while Close employed the grid as a tool to translate a photographic image to canvas. That show united work by Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian with that of Martin, Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson, and others. Norr mentioned a 1978–79 exhibition organized by Pace Gallery, “The Grid: Format and Image in Twentieth Century Art,” as a major predecessor of his own project. The grid, he told Artsy, is “not a profound mechanism for parsing art’s biggest ideas, but it’s certainly a way of organizing, a framework for thinking about the pressures to construct and work against composition.” The grid’s flatness eliminated a sense of reality and narrative-a positive thing for mid-century artists following the austere dictates championed by critic Clement Greenberg.Īt James Cohan in New York, senior director David Norr has mounted an exhibition entitled “Grids,” on view through July 27. Artists elevated the form from an invisible framework to a feature worthy of the spotlight. But only in the 20th century did the grid itself become the subject of artistic study and inquiry. In a 1979 issue of October, Rosalind Krauss established a critical framework for understanding how artists use the grid, going so far as to write that it “functions to declare the modernity of modern art.” For centuries, artists used the grid mainly as a tool to achieve proportional accuracy. As a network of woven linen threads, the canvas they work on is already a grid adding another grid on top lets painters comment on the act of painting itself. The grid is especially salient for painters. Despite the shared departure point, the diversity of their efforts suggest that the grid has almost limitless potential-inspiring meditations on color, spirituality, form, and the act of art-making itself. Merriam-Webster offers that “grid” is simply “a network of uniformly spaced horizontal and perpendicular lines (as for locating points on a map).” The grid is a predetermined, ordering structure which artists can choose to either follow or disrupt.įrom Ad Reinhardt to Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, Michelle Grabner, and Lynne Golob Gelfman, artists have both used and subverted the grid, co-opting a decidedly left-brain structure for their right-brain endeavors. Yet over the past century, visual artists have invoked the grid in pursuit of more abstract ends.Ĭheck the dictionary, and definitions skew utilitarian. Magazine art directors and graphic designers worship the grid as an organizing principle for print layouts, advertisements, and websites. The grid controls energy consumption and stores information in its sexier, Keanu Reeves-evoking form: the matrix. When we decide whether or not to use technology, we’re either on the grid or off it. Grids dictate the pattern of many 21st-century lives.
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