Grid
Art organised by a lattice of crossing lines, used as structure, as a drawing aid or as the image itself.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Grid are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
The grid has served artists as both tool and subject. Renaissance painters transferred drawings to walls and canvases by 'squaring up', and Albrecht Dürer's treatise on measurement shows a draughtsman studying his model through a frame strung with a lattice of threads. Woven textiles, tiled floors and graph paper made the grid familiar long before modern art adopted it.
In the 20th century it became a sign of order and neutrality. Piet Mondrian built compositions from black lines crossing on white from around 1920, and Agnes Martin, from about 1960, drew fine pencil grids over pale fields of paint to create quiet, breathing surfaces. Sol LeWitt based wall drawings and open cubes on modular systems, and Bernd and Hilla Becher displayed photographs of water towers and other industrial structures in grids. Look for whether a grid is ruled and mechanical or drawn by hand, with small tremors.
Related artists
More in Visual Qualities
Highly Detailed
Highly Ornamented
Irregular Curvilinear Forms
Irregular Linear Forms
Layered Images
Linear Forms
Marbleized
Metallic
Mimicking Ruined Materials
Mirrored
Pastel Colors
Patinated and Oxidized
Patterns
Pixelated
Primary Abstraction
Primary Colors
Psychedelic
Radiating Lines
Raw versus Finished
