Pattern, Colour, Space

According to art theorist Rosalind Krauss, the grid, as a symbol of 20th-century Western modernity, is “flattened, geometricized, ordered… In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface” (Krauss, R., ‘Grids,’ October, Vol. 9, Summer 1979, pp. 50–64, The MIT Press).

Al Munro’s work frequently employs the grids and patterns of woven fabrics to critique the grids of Modernist painting, as well as to visualise the fundamental structures and knowledge that help us map our world.

However, the characteristics of textile grids – the flex of warp and weft, the elasticity of knitted textiles, and the qualities of netting, which both admit and contain – provide a counterpoint to Krauss’s notions of a gridded or patterned surface as rigid, anti-realist, and flat. Through the Pattern and Space series of paintings, Al explores how patterns can generate spaces that are far from rigid, instead shifting between two and three dimensions. By combining traditional Thai fabrics with geometric forms, Al creates complex patterned surfaces that link historical motifs with those of scientific visualisation, emphasising the spatial correlations between the two.

The series of works on paper, Inventory of Spatial Possibilities, further investigates shifting spaces and the unstable rendering of space. Inspired by scientific and technical diagrams, the series subverts traditional conventions of perspective in painting by presenting multiple perspectival vanishing points within a single picture plane.

On view: 16 December 2024 – 12 January 2025
Opening event: 16 December, 18.00