GROUP EXHIBITION

Characterised 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.’