In her 1978 essay Grids, the art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss explores, in a structuralist sense, the grid as an emblem of modern art and outlines its mythic power, its ability to express and incorporate both material reality and the spiritual: “The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”[1] As David Joselit notes, the contradiction that Krauss recognizes in the grid has before been described by Michel Foucault as a central condition of modernity, and closely mirrors his broader description of modern thought as that which engages–attempts to resolve–the split between the empirical and the transcendental.[2] Tracing the evolution of the grid from Mondrian to Warhol in the 1960s, the author notices a shift in this contradiction for contemporary art.[3] Instead of emptying the grid of all but its purities or spiritualized essence, what Krauss calls the “concrete aspect” (rather than the “abstract”) of the grid takes precedence and serves to organize material drawn from the world.

fragile images as windows onto psychological realms. The artist has chosen to either maintain or interrupt the strict geometry of traditional grid compositions thereby bringing continuity and collision into play. As a result, his works produce associations with an insight or an outlook onto “something”, using the body like a sculptural bust to elicit the eros and psyche of his personas. Krauss connects the emergence of the grid with the use of the window in 19th century symbolist art, and describes the window as a “transparent vehicle that lets light–or spirit–into the darkness of the room. But if glass transmits, it also re ects. And so the window is experienced by the symbolist as a mirror as well–something that freezes and locks the self into the space of its own reduplicated being.”4 The artist ascribes in his works a dualism as laid out by Krauss by deconstructing and reconfiguring notions of inside and outside, front and back. In these replicated and fragmentary self-portraits Kaufmann draws analogies to ideas of psychoanalysis and subjectively alludes to the concept of conscious and subconscious.

Similarly, Lukas Kaufmann charges the rationality of the grid not with references to the transcendental, but with fragments of the everyday. In a series of varnished photographs on folded yellowish paper (all Untitled, 2024), sensitive imagery such as the exposed body or face of the artist are depicted in hues of brown sepia. Interweaving a range of production techniques, the artist generally questions the relationship between image carrier and image surface, while synergistically merging spatial and psychological dimensions. With utmost delicacy, Kaufmann continuously suggests ideas of structure and vagueness, distance and intimacy. By folding the paper, he underscores a spatiality in his works, becoming three-dimensional through the subsequent application of water and varnish, until the material outside the tectonic structure of the grid softens, curls. While the grids serve as the image carrier and focus the viewer’s gaze, the image surface seems to convey emotion, as the material takes on a sculptural life of its own. A simultaneous game of concealing and revealing of content or leitmotifs is a recurring approach in Kaufmann’s artistic practice and is continued in the exhibition.