The Infinite Poetry of the Grid

It seems so simple, the idea of a grid. A crisp arrangement of interlocking lines. You might expect to find one in a book of mathematics or engineering. You might not expect to find one on the walls of a gallery. Yet artists have used the grid as a springboard to explore an entire universe of feeling. In the same way that zeros and ones can be arranged to create binary code, the lines of a grid contain limitless potential. They represent the essence and energy of the physical world. We can think of few artists who have embraced the possibilities of the grid quite so remarkably as Agnes Martin and Piet Mondrian. 

Hidden Gallery is proud to present two exceptionally rare print portfolios that capture the full beauty of the grid within these artists’ oeuvres. Working decades apart, they each achieved something singular and timeless in their images, throwing off the shackles of representation and leaping into a whole different world of visual sensation.

Few artists encapsulated the spirit of Modernism quite so vividly as Piet Mondrian. In his mature works he advocated for the complete rejection of visually perceived reality as subject matter, and restricted his pictorial language to straight lines, primary colours, and neutral tones of black, white, and grey.

Mondrian sought to capture “a true vision of reality” in his painting, which meant forming a composition not from a fragment of observed reality but rather from an overall abstract view of the harmony of the universe. A painting no longer had to begin from an abstracted view of nature; it could emerge out of purely abstract rules of geometry and colour. 

The ten paintings reproduced in this portfolio demonstrate the very best of Mondrian's work. Printed in 1967 and published by Ives-Sillman, Inc. in an edition of only 150, they are a must for fans of Modernism's purest exponent. They are also incredibly hard to find. A complete set is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.