Building and Breaking the Grid, 19622002
September 1, 2005 - January 8, 2006
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
1-800-WHITNEY
Mel Bochner, ‘IsomorphPlan for a Photopiece’, 196667 (detail). Ink on graph paper, 13 x 19 in. (33 x 48.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Norman Dubrow 77.101. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.
The grid is one of the fundamental compositional and structuring devices of postwar art and became especially significant to the generation of Minimal and Conceptual artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s. This exhibition traces some of the ways artists have used the grid to create great variety and subtlety from that period to the present. Some, like Agnes Martin, have infinitesimally parsed its structure; others, such as Jasper Johns and Robert Morris, have loosened and played against its inherent severity or used it as a framework for ideas. Artists including Vija Celmins have worked with ideas of expansiveness and infinity suggested by the regularity and repetition inherent in the grid.