Matts Leiderstam has a PhD degree in fine arts and has previously been a professor at Malmö Art Academy. He is working as an external supervisor at the school during fall 2018, but starting 2019 he will be linked to KHM as a researcher. "What does the grid do?" has been granted a total of 3666000 SEK from the Swedish Research Council.
Abstract:
I have come to a point in my art practice and teaching where I would like to pose a deceptively simple question in relation to painting: what does the grid do? The meanings of the grid as developed in the Italian Renaissance – an aid for the composition and organization of painting – has shifted in profound ways. I have worked with the grid for many years and I find it holds an allusive quality, always open.
The aim of this project is to focus on ways of seeing in relation to contemporary painting practices, and to trace what it is that remains, the ruins perhaps of artistic knowledge connected to the concept of the grid – so rooted in Western art history. Whether it is; the recent return to abstract painting, historically associated with the grid, or the amplification of the uses of the grid in the context of a quantum shift in our time of planetary- scale computing – in a culture dominated by the mediations of the screen, how might the grid frame what it is that we inherit.
This research will adopt a heterogeneous approach, initially based in painting – and as in my practice, there will be inevitable encounters through other mediums. My methods derive from teaching, as well as archival research and those experiments and dialogues that take place within the studio context. The realization of this project will be through publication and exhibition, with the aim to underscore the concept of the grid as it is used as a visual code, as well as a prism to look ‘through’.