Matts Leiderstam's new research-based exhibition opens at Andrehn-Schiptjenko
Matts Leiderstam, What Does the Grid Do? (Grande Machine), 2022–26, Courtesy of the Artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko © Jean-Baptiste Béranger.
PARIS.—
For more than three decades, Matts Leiderstam (b. 1956) has occupied a singular position in contemporary art. Through an unwavering and conceptually rigorous engagement with art history, modes of display, and the act of looking, he has developed one of the most rigorous and distinctive artistic practices in Scandinavia. Situated at the intersection of painting, research, and institutional critique, his work unfolds as a sustained investigation into the structures that shape how we see and understand images.
The exhibition presents a new chapter in Leiderstam’s continuous research into art history and the grid — two frameworks that have persistently shaped his practice. Rather than treating art history as a fixed canon, he approaches it as a dynamic field of negotiation, where omissions, marginal positions, and coded — often queer — narratives can be made visible. Since the late 1980s, Leiderstam has returned repeatedly to historical paintings, museum collections, and archival materials, subtly shifting perspective to reveal hidden structures of power, desire, and authorship. Through paraphrase, repetition, and displacement, he exposes and challenges the patriarchal and normative frameworks that have long structured Western art history.
Here, Leiderstam returns to a project he initiated more than twenty years ago, inspired by Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Rebekah Taking Leave of Her Father (1640–41), a painting in the collection of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. An X-ray examination of the work reveals that the sun was originally positioned elsewhere in the composition, offering insight into the artist’s process and revisions. Engaging once again with this art historical point of departure, Leiderstam has produced a new series of circular paintings. These works are presented in dialogue with Inside Outside, a diptych C-print from 2004, creating a layered conversation between past and present investigations in his practice.
Central to this exhibition is the grid: a compositional tool developed during the Italian Renaissance that continues to underpin image production, from photography to digital screens. For Leiderstam, the grid is not merely a formal device but a conceptual lens. It structures perspective and organises vision, yet it also conceals ideologies within its apparent neutrality. By reactivating the grid within painting and installation, he probes its historical authority while reimagining it as a critical and queer framework for seeing — one that connects early perspectival systems to today’s networked visual culture.
Also central to the presentation are works from the Archived series — prints and drawings derived from collected visual references — alongside the Panel paintings, executed in oil and acrylic on poplar wood. These works emerge from the act of inscribing and disrupting the grid across the picture plane, where precision gives way to hesitation, deviation, and embodied gesture. In form, they resonate both with Renaissance panel painting and with the luminous surfaces of contemporary screens.
Over the decades, Leiderstam has established a unique international position through his sustained dialogue with painting and its histories. His works are represented in major public and private collections worldwide, including Moderna Museet; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein; Magasin III – Museum of Contemporary Art; Seattle Art Museum; Iziko South African National Gallery; The Deutsche Bank Collection; Huis Marseille – Museum for Photography; Laumeier Sculpture Park; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo; and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, among many others.
Through a practice that combines painterly precision with conceptual depth, Matts Leiderstam continues to pose deceptively simple yet urgent questions: What does the grid do? What does painting do? And how does the act of looking shape what art can be?
