In our world it’s inescapable but largely ignored. It determines the design of architecture, urban planning, scientific categorization, spreadsheets, maps and the web. It’s the western word’s invisible underlying structure for organizing information, perception and representation. I’m talking about the grid — that rectilinear matrix of vertical and horizontal lines which flexes its simplicity to impose order on excess, wrangle efficiencies and flatten hierarchies.

The grid’s influence starts with its primitive universality. In 2011 scientists discovered red cross hatch marks drawn with ochre on a cave wall 73,000 years old, perhaps the oldest human drawing ever found. Ancient Greeks and Romans used it to design their cities. Leonardo da Vinci turned it into a perspectograph to aid in the achivement of realistic linear perspective, and it’s still used to teach beginning art students to draw.

Throughout its history the grid has proven to be endlessly flexible, and that has made it irresistible to artists. During the rise of minimalism and geometric abstraction in the 1960s and 70s, artists adopted the grid for its compositional stability and conceptual depth, leading renowned critic Rosalind Krauss to declare in her 1979 essay Grids “…it is safe to say that no form within the whole of modern aesthetic production has sustained itself so relentlessly while at the same time being so impervious to change.” (Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October, vol. 9, Summer 1979).

Blythe Bohnen, "Grid Movement, Wet Pigment Brush Stroke across Thin Watercolor Line," 1974. Charcoal stick and watercolor on paper, 28 3/8 x 22 1/2." David Hall Gallery.

In some part a reaction to the heavy influence of male artists like Sol LeWitt seemingly “owning” abstraction, many female artists co-opted the grid format in the 1970s in an attempt to reject the patriarchal art world canon and it’s biases, and address abstraction on their own terms. They also saw the grid as a sandbox in which to test aesthetic and material conventions (does a painting have to be made with paint? do grid lines have to be straight?). To this day, the grid continues to feature in the art of women.

The grid doesn’t have to disappear. By making it their subject, female and feminist artists analyze and question the hold it has on the way we act and see the world, on how value systems are created, how art gets made, and how arbitrary rules become convention. Below are just a handful of the artists whose work benefits from and showcases the conceptual adaptability and aesthetic significance of the grid.

AGNES MARTIN (1912 - 2004)

For some artists, the grid provided a position from which to turn away from logic and reason and aspire toward the evocation of pure feeling. This was most famously the case with the American painter Agnes Martin.

Agnes Martin paintings at Pace Gallery, New York.

Agnes Martin, “Little Sister,” 1962. Oil, ink and brass nails on canvas and wood.

Agnes Martin’s art was decisively non-representational and non-biographical. She did not want her work to be “read” or interpreted narratively or symbolically.

Martin gravitated toward the grid for its neutral sameness, quiet and reliability. For her, repetitive motions making non-representational marks created a path toward spirituality. In fact, standing before her work can feel almost religious, the meditative and luminous qualities of her canvases elicit an overwhelming sense of peace. They seem to glow from within, the barely perceptible graphite lines anchoring the vibrating bars of color.

“Artwork that is completely abstract—free from any expression of the environment—is like music and can be responded to in the same way. Our response to line and tone and color is the same as our response to sounds. . . . It holds meaning for us that is beyond expression in words.”

— Agnes Martin

YAYOI KUSAMA (born 1929)

Celebrated pop artist Yayoi Kusama has spoken widely about the visions which have assaulted her since childhood: empty voids marked by grid or dot patterns, giving her the feeling of being thrust untethered into space. For Kusama, who still paints in her 90s, art is a solace and a method of moving her visions outside of her head into the real world where they can be better controlled and understood.

Though she has worked in many mediums throughout her long and storied career, Kusama is in her heart a painter and a devotee of the grid. Obsessed with notions of infinity, mortality, obliteration and the void, Kusama began painting dots early in her career. Her net paintings are believed to have been a key precursor to Minimalism.

Yayoi Kusama, "Accumulation of Nets (No. 7)" 1962. Collage of gelatin silver prints, 29 x 24 1/2".

“Accumulation of Nets (No. 7)” is a particularly dynamic example of Kusama’s interest in the grid. To make it she painted over 40 net paintings in black on white canvas, photographed the paintings, and then mounted a collage of the photographs in a grid format. Therefore the result is an accumulation of accumulations, a grid of grids.

She said of her “Infinity Nets” series: “My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe…”

Kusama’s work helps people imagine invisible forces like gravity, lightwaves and currents that, woven together, create the dynamic fabric of space-time and define our universe.

HARMONY HAMMOND (born 1944)

Unlike Martin, Harmony Hammond makes work that is overtly political. A pioneer of the feminist art movement, Hammond helped co-found A.I.R. Gallery, the first non-profit, artist-run gallery for women in the country, along with Eva Hesse, Howardeena Pindell, Blythe Bohnen and others.

Hammond’s work addresses women’s labor and socialized gender roles from a specific female-centric perspective. By densely layering evocative materials such as bandages, quilts and rivets with paint, she imbues her abstract works with a powerful corporality. Her works are often monumental in scale and confrontational in their methodology. She’s interested in repetitive gestures such as weaving and stitching, “reflecting the repetition in women's lives - and a connective gesture - a means of piecing together or building “wholes” out of fragments.”

“The grid was a visual device or strategy for organizing time and space. How might it relate to women’s experiences or issues of “likeness,” “sameness,” and “difference”? ”

— Harmony Hammond

“Patched,” one of Hammond’s recent pieces exhibited in the 2023 Whitney Biennial, features a repurposed red and white quilt interrupted by blood-stained cotton squares, which, according to the artist, point to the “repeated and ongoing violence against women, [including] the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, and sexual brutality against women used as a weapon of war.”

“Patched” has been exhibited with Hammond’s “Bandaged Grids” series (2015 - present), in which the artist layers found fabrics and bandages over grids of grommeted holes. She explained of this work: “A bandaged grid implies an interruption of the narrative of the modernist grid and therefore, an interruption of utopian egalitarian order … a precarity. But also, however fragile, the possibility of holding together, of healing.”

BLYTHE BOHNEN (1940 - 2022)

Blythe Bohnen was working in New York at the same time as Harmony Hammond, Eva Hesse and Howardena Pindell (to name a few) but had a very different objective. Rather than attempting to convey pure emotion, work through traumatic experiences or upset the male dominance of the art establishment, Bohnen was focused on capturing, recording and analyzing the very essence of the mark — the way a human gesture created a physical impression (brushstroke /line /stitch) in space and time.

In the catalog for a recent show of her work, A.I.R. Gallery described this impulse as related to her “metaphysical interest in impermanence, memory, and renewal.”

“The motion never goes out so far that it goes out of the magnetic field of center. The motion goes out, then returns to being at rest. Like a dance. How do you find your center in a world of change?”

— Blythe Bohnen

A true process artist, Bohnen broke every element of her work down to its most foundational elements. Between 1968 and 1972 she created a series of large grid paintings called the “Brushstroke” paintings. For Bohnen, the grid became a metaphor for imposed constraint — social conventions which boxed women into limiting, marginal roles. She forced herself to obey strict conditions while painting her brushstrokes and repeated them inside the lines of her grids without touching the sides, as if the grid lines were repellent.

Her isolated brushstrokes are often circular, suggesting repeated action, the cycle of life and death, and even human folly.

What complicates Bohnen’s “Brushstroke” series intellectually, and makes her work all the more significant historically, was her process of rinsing the paintings in the shower before they were dry, releasing the paint’s pigment from its binder and leaving behind a skeleton or blueprint of her physical gesture. In this way, Bohnen’s work addresses issues of care, femininity and the body, putting her in conversation with Harmony Hammond, Eva Hesse and even some of the woven paintings by Regina Bogat.

HOWARDENA PINDELL (born 1943)

Artist-curator-critic Howardena Pindell recalls being told as a child that certain objects marked with a dot or circle on the tag were for white customers only. The experience made an indelible impression on her and hole-punched paper dots have become a signature material in her work.

Detail of Howardena Pindell's "Untitled #24," 1978-79. Acrylic, paper, powder, sequins, glitter on sewn canvas squares. 86 1/2 x 103".

In Pindell’s lush vernacular, layers and layers of hole-punched paper accrue and create texture along with glitter, written series of numbers and other materials, accumulate on complex grid bases. Using principals of abstraction, repetition and excess, Pindell, who was the first African American woman to serve in MOMA’s curatorial department, revisits and rewrites her painful lived experiences of institutional racism by creating timeless, abstract retellings of her story.

Pindell also leveraged the modernist stranglehold on the grid by testing its material composition. While her paintings included many materials other than paint, her “Untitled” grid sculpture demonstrated that grid lines could respond to gravity to great effect. As much as any other artist of her generation, Howardena Pindell continues to inspire and influence artists working in abstraction today.

Howardena Pindell, "Untitled" 1968-70. Mixed media assemblage, acrylic paint, canvas, grommets and stuffing. 144 x 144".

CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS

If the grid form is meant to suggest stability, harmony and equity in its flat redundancy, contemporary artists respond by exploding, deconstructing and piercing it, commenting on society’s refusal to deliver those promises to all. “The grid is repurposed as a visual metaphor for the failures of supposedly rational ways of seeing under the inequitable conditions of Western capitalism and imperialism. Artists suggest new and emancipatory ways of seeing, shaped especially by experiences of Indigeneity, queerness, immigration, gender, and race.” (The Loeb, “On the Grid, Ways of Seeing in Print”).

Formally, artists continue to disprove any notion that the grid’s foundational structure must remain intact and challenge the modernist notion of the chasm between abstraction and representation. Process continues to dominate as does bold experimentation with category and material. As author Kim Grant explains in All About Process: The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labor, “Paint shifts from a colored substance used as a vehicle for representation to become a subject for contemplation and investigation, a physical material examined and manipulated in all its permutations.”

MICHELLE GRABNER (born 1962)

What are the power structures inherent in abstract patterns? Michelle Grabner wrestles with this question in her paintings and sculptures of ubiquitous domestic textiles: blankets, rug backings, curtains and common designs such as gingham.

Michelle Grabner, "Untitled" 2021. Oil on burlap. 20 x 16."

Grabner plays with the conceit of the Modernist grid by fashioning its replicas from things considered below high art: forgettable, non-academic subject matter one finds in any middle class kitchen, den or bedroom. A professor based in Chicago and Wisconsin, she has carved out a space not just for devalued, homey things, but for artists and criticism coming from the midwest.

Her work deftly references traditions from both abstraction and representation. A blanket painting, for example, shows signs of use by a child, or a rug backing painting features an imperfect grid, worn in by treads of the feet that walked on it.

“My subjects were crocheted blankets, curtains, paper towel patterns, gingham motifs, the kinds of things that were within reach of my very middle-class domestic environment. What became clear was that it wasn’t the subjects that were interesting to me, but the repetition, the redundancy, the predictability of these domestic backdrops.”

— Michelle Grabner

ELLEN GALLAGHER (born 1965)

In many respects, the grid acts according to its core capabilities in the art of Ellen Gallagher, ordering and harnessing massive amounts of material, ideas and meaning. In her collages such as “eXelento” (2004) and “DeLuxe” (2004-5) the grid performs a reframing of the viewers’ experience of manipulated racially charged images, creating a spacial rather than a sequential reading, in this case of advertisements from Black magazines such as Ebony, Jet and Our World.

Ellen Gallagher, "eXelento," 2004. Ink, paper, Plasticine and resin on canvas. 96 x 192".

Detail of Ellen Gallagher's "eXelento," 2004.

Gallagher’s extensive oeuvre includes paintings, collages, drawings and films, and intersects with pop art, abstraction, mythology and assemblage. “eXelento,” currently on view at the Broad in LA, is a collection of 396 black and white advertising images which have been lovingly recast using Gallagher’s lexicon of thickly whited-out eyes and elaborate plasticine hairstyles. The grid arrangement allows the characters to be isolated yet grouped, much in the way the brushstroke images are simultaneously autonomous and part of a collection in Blythe Bohnen’s Brushstroke paintings.

Gallagher uses the grid to pose provocative questions about representation, perpetuation and social identity. The hundreds of Black women and men featured in these advertisements were acting out roles in order to sell products for which the company used racial stereotypes and commercial ploys. They are absurd but also, she insists, beautiful. The obscene yellow and white plasticine hairdos, one after the other after the other, combine into a powerful reflection of the obscene history of negative representation people of color have endured and continue to face today.

“This idea of repetition and revision is central to my working process.”

— Ellen Gallagher

JUTTA HAECKEL (born 1972)

Düsseldorf-based artist Jutta Haeckel reminds us that some materials are themselves grids, making them formally and ideologically rich starting points far beyond simple supports. Canvas, burlap, jute and other textiles favored by artists are a product of their warp and weft weaving — cross-hatched at their core.

Haeckel, who prefers jute, creates her dizzying, chaotic paintings through a multi-step process. She works from the back and presses paint through the jute, creating raised globules which read almost like pixels. She then projects specific but hard-to-identify images onto the front of the canvas which she paints precisely, thereby forcing a dialogue between the abstract and the representative challening the modernist precept that the two cannot co-exist.

Jutta Haeckel, "Cosmic Background Radiation 1," 2022. Acrylic on jute, 59 x 74 3/4".

The artist has talked about the push and pull between “draufsicht” (to look at) and “durchsicht” (to see through). That tension creates an exhilarating, destabilizing tension between micro and macro views which connects Haeckel’s paintings, in my mind, to Julie Mehretu’s work, as different as the end results may be.

““The splashes and drips are metaphors for shapes and structures in flux. Their associations range from camouflage, graffiti, and barbed wire to diagrams of data and Google Earth maps. Sometimes the splashes look like explosions, which for some people might infer recent terror attacks, but I see them as reflections of the most radical change and conflict in general. Which also implies the possibility of a new beginning.”

— Jutta Haeckel

Lesley Hilling

Lesley Hilling’s wood sculptures begin with a grid foundation and build from there, much like the ancient Greek cities which began with a grid and grew up around it. A prolific assemblage artist, Hilling constructs her intricate pieces from recycled and salvaged wood and other found objects such as photographs, stamps and timepieces.

“An artificial grid... is a social containment that keeps power within a small group of people. Trying to opt out of this structure is referred to as ‘living off grid’ suggesting subversion, rebellion and no electricity! We need to be suspicious of grids and conformity, maybe it’s circumspect to use its best element – structure – and then go wild and free around it!””

— Lesley Hilling

Originally trained as a graphic designer, Hilling, who lives in Brixton, South London, brings an algorithmic technicality and comfort with complexity to her work. Not surprisingly, she counts Louise Nevelson as a major influence.

It’s refreshing to encounter Hilling’s sense of nostalgia, a very un-modernist quality. She imbues her work with a sadness for the lives lived by the objects she collects and takes apart in order to give them new life. She is unapologetic about that conceptual longing and captures an innocence inside her highly complex built sculptures.

Leslie Hilling works outside of the commercial art world infrastructure, making her an example of living successfully off or outside of the “grid.”

Contemporary artists are constantly proving Rosalind Krauss wrong — the grid is subject to change, and not only that, it’s up to the challenge. The grid enthusiastically adapts to whatever distortion or disruption artists dream up, without losing its identity. Always there is the tension between the sense that a piece is self-contained (Blythe Bohnen wrote in her notes “death = the edge of the canvas…”) and that the grid form could go on forever.

Given the repetitive simplicity of its DNA, the grid’s capacity for inspiring experimentation and deconstruction is in every way a testament to the artists who play with it. Contemporary female artists continue to find its patterned plane a fertile ground, using the left brained base for unique, exciting right brain ideas.

*Note: The list of artists included here represents a small sample and is in no way exhaustive. It leaves out countless artists and entire traditions such as quilting and textile design from around the world. I would love to hear your thoughts on other female artists who work with the grid, as well as other global traditions.

*Cover Image: Lance Anderson