STOCKHOLM.- Matts Leiderstam's solo exhibition Seen Through the Grid is now opening at Andréhn-Schiptjenko. In his work, Matts Leiderstam is in constant dialogue with the history of painting and its relationship to the gaze. He methodically searches for alternative, queer, narratives connected to the act of looking at a painting and also explores how the gaze is changing over time. Since the late 1980s, Leiderstam has mainly worked with painting, often based on photographic sources. In the first half of the 1990s, his work took a political turn and his field of interest expanded to the landscape and the park as a site for gay cruising. This parallel perspective was later transferred to art history and, more specifically, to the physical space of the museum. Since then, he has studied and then paraphrased older paintings in a series of works; staging the structures that the image makers of art history utilized to organize the gaze and its play. By using several different forms of interpretation as well as the relationship between original and copy as a method, he was able to challenge the patriarchal gaze that has characterized much of art history.

Since 2016, Matts Leiderstam has worked on a series of works that in different ways relate to the grid as a visual structure. "What does the grid do?" and "What does the painting do?" are the seemingly simple but complex questions that guided Leiderstam and have been posed in relation to both painting and contemporary technology. Grids as a tool for the composition of images were developed during the Italian Renaissance and, to this day, continue to play a central role in the creation of images, both in the photographic and computer-generated image. Leiderstam questions his own personal relationship to the grid, which is founded in a Western painting tradition and the use of linear perspective, and experiences "his" grid as a queer lens to see through.

The core of the exhibition consists of the Archived series, a number of prints and drawings based on various collected visual references, which form the basis of Leiderstam's ideas on what paintings actually do and how we look at them. The exhibition also shows a series of paintings, Panel, made in oil and/or acrylic on poplar wood panels and sprung from the act of drawing the lines of a grid over the image surface, where impulses and mistakes lead the process forward. In form, the paintings are similar to contemporary screens as well as wooden panels of older times, such as icons and unframed Italian Renaissance portraits.

Leiderstam's examination of the grid has resulted in two previous exhibitions at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, in Stockholm in 2018 and Paris in 2021. In the spring of 2022, a more extensive exhibition was also presented at the The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm as part of Leiderstam's artistic research project What Does the Grid Do? with support from the Swedish Research Council. In mid-September, Art & Theory Publishing will also publish a richly illustrated book about this project, titled Matts Leiderstam Seen Through the Grid.

Matts Leiderstam (b. 1956) resides and works in Stockholm. He graduated in 2006 with a PhD from the Malmö Art Academy and in 1989 with an MA from the Valand Academy of Art in Gothenburg. Leiderstam has previously exhibited at The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Salonul de Proiecte, Bucharest; Collectors Space, Istanbul; The 11th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai; The National Gallery, Prague; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Heine Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; The 8th Berlin Biennale, Berlin; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz; Magasin III - Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm, among others.

Andréhn-Schiptjenko
Matts Leiderstam: Seen Through the Grid
August 17th, 2023 - September 3rd, 2023