Cities are full of grids: streets layouts trying to tame the natural landscape, plus paving patterns, railing designs, building elevations and cladding systems, while underneath the streets are grids of pipes, ducts, tunnels and cables.
Architects Squire and Partners played with colour in the grid of the recessed windows of the new development at 4/5 Hanover Square, with Italian artist Esther Stocker’s playful black and white marble artwork livening up the façade while Caruso St John Architects created the interiors for Blain|Southern’s gallery, including a grid of stone paving slabs.
Now, 9 contemporary artists from the UK and North America play with the grid “Playground Structure” at Blain Southern, taking as a starting point Jeff Walls photograph of playground structure which could be an artwork, an atomic model or part of a geodesic architectural structure.
Jeremy Moon’s Ice Palace grid is the most regular of all, while in his other work “No 1/70″ the grid intersections break free and fry off, as does Mary Heilmann’s “Pink Synergie”. Others twist and turn and become fluid. Dan Walsh’s grids are architectural, creating images of towers, as if built of building blocks, Daniel Sturgis’ pink grids crash into each other like geological strata, with white bouncing balls breaking out of them and Ed Moses is more graphical. The curators have put work with different synergies throughout the gallery, complimenting colours, forms and shapes from different artists, Amy Feldman’s two complimentary cloud-like paintings facing each other and Joan Snyder having three works of different degrees of formality/informaility u do wonder if it is really the same artist.
Rachel Howard brings different perspectives with a medical link in “Symptoms and Side Effects” with its intersecting blocks and her works “Broken Grid Theory” and “It feels like this” which seem to link to a different sort of grid, that of technology and the internet.
