Unlocking the Grid
March 8 - April 14, 2018
Reception: Thursday, March 8th, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce a group exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the following artists: Stephen Antonakos, Jennifer Bartlett, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Louis I. Kahn, Jan Müller, Louise Nevelson, James Siena, Joaquín Torres-García, Stanley Whitney and an Anonymous textile by the Kuba peoples, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, or Angola.

This exhibition will explore compositional similarities and differences across a group of seemingly disparate artworks. Created by myriad artists who cross geographical location, schools, and generations, this show seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the organizational framework of the grid transcends any particular group of artists or movements and remains, to this day, a source of inspiration and fascination.

In some paintings, such as Joaquín Torres-García’s Constructive Painting (c. 1931) or Adolph Gottlieb’s Nostalgia for Atlantis (1944), the grid is used to compartmentalize the canvas into smaller rectangles that house pictograms and symbols. In this way, the grid operates as a place that combines both reading and looking. In other works, like Jennifer Bartlett’s Swimming Pool (Early 1970s), the grid (silkscreened onto the ground of the steel plate) intrinsically spaces and allocates the site in which she paints her dots as a kind of means to an end.

While many of these artists are dedicated to the language of geometric abstraction, they have resolutely denied its impersonal constraints. Using color, texture, and myriad geometric structures, these artists forgo mathematical precision in favor of more layered meaning and relate the works as much to landscape, the body, and experience as to their abstract core.

Unlocking the Grid will be on view from March 8 – April 14, 2018. A reception will be held on Thursday, March 8th from 6:00-8:00pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@booksteinprojects.com.