#allthingsgrids

All Things Grids: In addition to the work of Charles Gaines, this blog will highlight the work of artists who incorporate the grid. United by the theme of a “grid aesthetic,” the works featured represent a cross section of movements, generations and materials, and demonstrate the varied use of the grid in modern and contemporary art.

All Things Grids: In addition to the work of Charles Gaines, this blog will highlight the work of artists who incorporate the grid. United by the theme of a “grid aesthetic,” the works featured represent a cross section of movements, generations and materials, and demonstrate the varied use of the grid in modern and contemporary art.

All Things Grids: In addition to the work of Charles Gaines, this blog will highlight the work of artists who incorporate the grid. United by the theme of a “grid aesthetic,” the works featured represent a cross section of movements, generations and materials, and demonstrate the varied use of the grid in modern and contemporary art.

Ellen Gallagher, They Could Still Serve, 2001

"Gallagher has simultaneously adopted the grid and reversed its rigorous use by a former generation of Minimalist and Conceptualist artists: her patches of blue lined paper form a grid pattern, but it is liquefied, disassembled, blurred, and dematerialized with watercolor. Among the papers’ blue lines are small marks, a repeated stereotyped sign of race drawn from minstrelsy: wide eyes peering out at the viewer. These signs are paradoxically at once free floating and mapped in her grid structures. They Could Still Serve takes its title from an etching in Francisco de Goya’s series The Disasters of War (1810–20), a caustic meditation on the brutality and futility of human warfare."