NETWORK

Skarstedt Paris announces 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.

February 8 – March 16, 2024

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.

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.

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.