Artist research

Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid is the first exhibition to focus on the centrality of the grid in LeWitt’s art. The exhibition focuses on LeWitt’s use of the grid as a generative matrix for his artistic production over the span of nearly five decades, from 1960 until his death in 2007. Inspired by his first encounter with the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1950s, LeWitt began experimenting with a loosely structured grid in several large oil paintings of 1960, based on the Muybridge motif of a running man. By 1962 he had simplified his use of this format to exclude figurative elements, and by 1964 he was making his first wall-mounted grid structures. When LeWitt made his first wall drawings in 1968 he used the grid as the underlying structural principle. Thereafter, grids became a pervasive matrix in all of the media in which LeWitt worked--three-dimensional “structures,” drawings and gouaches on paper, photographic cycles, artist’s books, furniture and wall drawings.

Composition No. 10: Pier and Ocean

By the time Modrian was stranded in Holland, He was ready to develop his unique and individual style combining the tenets of the Parisian avant-garde and Theosophy. It is  Holland in the town of Laren that Mondrian developed his characteristic approach to painting, the grid composition.  The grid evolved out of his observation of the ocean and the way the piers jutted out into the water.  His Piers and Ocean series of 1915, became Composition in Line of 1916-17 with “plus” and “minus” lines. The reduction of nature to horizontals and verticals and the monochromatic approach of Cubism marked a turning point of his work.

Gerhard Richter, “1025 Farben” (1974), 254 cm x 254 cm, enamel on canvas

 1025 colors are randomly placed within the grid on the canvas. The painting has a high degree of entropy because you can imagine switching any two colors and it would probably not change the overall experience of the work. In this work, Richter rejects the role as editor in that the number of colors are based on those that are available and their positions are assigned at random. It is interesting to note that when Hirst makes his dot paintings that are superficially similar, Hirst finds it necessary to assign chemical compositions as titles and is comfortable with the narrative that they suggest.

Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1960-66, Guggenheim Museum, NY.

   The grid like structure of the painting slowly comes in to focus as the blacks begin to slowly differentiate themselves. For painters like Reinhardt and Martin, form was one way to reject the artist's role as editor and a rigorous simplicity becomes the antidote to technique. It is worth taking a moment to think about why Ad Reinhardt's paintings worked and the problems the paintings solved for him. A square is the same for everyone and a grid from nine squares is the same from any orthogonal direction. It is at once direct, accessible, absolute and infinite. In the black paintings even the grid is almost obliterated by the subtly varying shades of black squares. I don't think that Reinhardt decided to make a painting about squares; it was just that every other painting he made seemed to make was overdone or extraneous. It was not an intellectual decision and he wasn't trying to make a formal statement. It was simply the only solution that worked but to make it work he had to give up a lot of his earlier ideas about what painting was. The black paintings are not about the grid nor are they necessarily about the color black. They are about the experience of Art. Anything else was unnecessary. The grid and the black color are tools but do necessarily reveal anything about his intention. To understand his intention you have to look at the paintings he made. The key was not putting more of himself into the paintings but taking more of himself out, especially because he was always going to be there in the end anyway.