Skarstedt Paris is pleased to announce Network, a show that traces the grid’s formal possibilities as an avenue through which to grasp and represent the world—mentally, spiritually, and physically, over the past forty years. Featuring works by John Baldessari, Georg Baselitz, George Condo, Günther Förg, Martin Kippenberger, Yayoi Kusama, Sigmar Polke, Rosemarie Trockel, Günther Uecker, Sue Williams, and Christopher Wool, the artists chosen for Network are not geometrically abstract artists, or even strictly abstract artists. In selecting those whose oeuvres are not defined by the use of the grid, and yet harness it as an infrastructure of their vision, the show aims to reveal the grid’s universality as a symbol and a framework beyond its quintessential uses. Indeed, the show revisits the grid’s position as the ultimate “emblem of modernity,” which can be called upon to exercise a multitude of ideas.[1]
Characterized by its flattened, geometric, and ordered nature, the use of the grid can be technically traced back to the Renaissance as an optic tool to transfer the newly discovered laws of perspective. However, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it flourished into a language of its own, from the atmospheric dotted grid of Post-Impressionist Pointillism to the perspectival upending of conventional space in Cubism, then evolving into a subject in its own right in works by Piet Mondrian, followed by the spiritual and pure Minimalist grids of the 1960s. Despite its inherently abstract nature, this history makes plain that the grid’s origins are largely rooted in figuration, an idea that regained a foothold in art after the 1960s, when Network’s dialogue begins. John Elderfield and Rosalind Krauss, who have both remarked on this lineage and trace the modern use of the grid back to the representation of the window. Rosalind Krauss, in particular, notes, “behind every twentieth century grid there lies—like trauma that must be repressed—a symbolist window parading in the guise of a treatise on optics.”[2]
Moving away from his monochrome works in favor of a more intuitive web of line and color, Günther Förg’s grid painting Untitled (2001), from the artist’s Gitterbilder series, focuses on the grid as a matrix of representation and expands upon his earlier use of the window, turning the strict lines of the structure into energetic strokes of paint that emphasize the essence of painting itself, and the freedom that can be found within the apparent confinement of the mullion-like network. Similarly, Georg Baselitz’s use of the grid in Gartenzaun (1988) enforces a sense of fragmentation: the viewer registers a continuum beyond the focused visibility of the window. The inverted house—and the ultimate reduction of the human habitat that we see through it—continues beyond the limits of what Baselitz allows us to see.
Günther Uecker, on the other hand, takes a spiritual approach to the grid-as-window, exploring freedom and universality within its confines, as seen in Vertezungen Verbindungen 1 (Injuries Connection 1) (2007). The nails just out from the support in all directions, creating an allover network of light and shadow of nails, sticking towards and from the surface in spiritual liberation of the grid all the while returning to the most primal facets of visual perception as a means of moving humanity closer to a kind of cosmic essence. Similarly, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets (2018) ethereally express the ways in which the inner world of one’s imagination can splay out to become an all-encompassing life force. With billowing dots spread across the entirety of the canvas, the work is both personal and universal, emblematic of boundlessness of space and the human creativity.
Nodding to the grid’s Cubist origins while moving into a figurative network of expressionistic patterns, George Condo’s The Oval Abstraction (2017) delivers a figurative scaffolding under the guise of automatic drawing, resulting into a playful network of human expressions. The grid facilitates the reading of a complex array of emotions and archetypes, where distorted figures, with their bared teeth and bulging eyes, slip away into lyrical lines that swoop across the canvas, providing hints of an arm here, a breast there, all speaking to the multitude of emotional states one can feel simultaneously. Sigmar Polke’s Untitled (2002) features layers of liquid abstraction overlaying hints of figurative imagery taken from a medieval manuscript, creating a kind of translucent, net-like surface. Made in the aftermath of 9/11, this honeycombed surface offers a nuanced reflection on the notion of surveillance and the all-seeing, while simultaneously referencing his Rasterbilder works of the 1960s and the way they mimicked the half-tones of printing techniques to subvert and questions ideas of truth.
Likewise, Sue Williams’s All Quiet (2018) is a turning point from the politically charged, pattern-like overall grids of her paintings from the 1990s towards a freer use of the grid, where body parts morph into landscapes that subsequently turn into a constellation of neural connections that speak humorously about overcoming trauma—freely intertwining the things that shape us and reveal the vulnerable nature of being human. John Baldessari’s Overlap Series: Arm and Blindfolded Man/Stairs (2001) literally overlays quotidian urban landscapes and film stills on a three-part grid displayed like an inverted triptych. By overlapping instead of abutting one another, the gridded imagery fuses to create a third zone. As Baldessari explains: “real life, movies, and the results of that union: art (i.e., a third world created by the two other worlds intersecting. The meaning? The collision of man and nature and art”.[3]
The networking of forms can also come in the shape of a readymade, as a kind of decorative pattern whose content informs its meaning. Martin Kippenberger’s 15. Preis (aus der Serie Preisbilder) (1987) uses an allover screen-printed checkered pattern of yellow, black, gray, and red that evokes a picnic blanket or a tea towel. Over the top, Kippenberger has stamped the phrase “15. Preis,” the German word for “price” or “prize,” inviting the viewer to question the value of art and its position as a series of trophies to be collected: who is awarded which prizes, and who determines the valuation system of art? In typical Kippenberger fashion, the humor in how he asks these questions derives from the gridded patterned decoration and its reference to quotidian, mass-produced objects that are inherently cheap and accessible. Rosemarie Trockel’s decision to use the craft of knitting to produce wool works such as Untitled (1992) creates an interlocking set of repeated patterns that form both the support and the central figure. Although it appears at first glance to be handmade, it was, in fact, industrially produced by a blueprint created on a computer. In juxtaposing the handmade and the computer-generated, Trockel allows a seemingly simply set of knits and purls to expose the contradictory nature of the social divide between the quintessentially “masculine” and the quintessentially “feminine.” Similarly, Christopher Wool’s Gate (P14) (1986) uses patterned rollers to create an allover decorative pattern, in immersive lattice effect, across an aluminum surface, out of which is born a noteworthy tension between the pre-planned and the accidental. For although the choice of roller predetermines the repetitive motif that is to be laid onto the support, little differences in the application of paint or the pressure with which the roller is applied to the surface call attention to the act of painting itself. The decorative quality is a kind of deception, a false sense of security. In all these works, the seemingly simple and “decorative” become a tool to discuss political, social, and existentially artistic themes.
In the works on view in Network, grids, patterns, and interlocking arrays of forms allow each artist the ability to use the preexisting as a visual structure. It becomes a net they cast out into the world, returning with a sample of the infinite possibilities of the universe, connected through an intelligible mapping. Whether we lean towards those using the grid to expand into infinity in a centrifugal reading, or those who structure the painting as an autonomously mapped unit, the purpose of Network is to question the paradox between the horizontal world of science and matter connecting with the vertical world of spirit and ideas.
[1] Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 51.
[2] Ibid., 59.
[3] John Baldessari, “Artist’s Statements,” in Patric Pardo and Robert Dean, eds., John Baldessari Catalogue Raisonné Volume Four: 1994 – 2004 (New Haven: Marian Goodman Gallery in association with Yale University Press, 2017), 406.