Check Mate(s) brings together several grid paintings and studies by Colombian-born artist Oscar Murillo, along with individual works by other artists who explore the grid in related ways. Some years ago, Murillo began recycling fragments and offcuts of discarded and unfinished paintings, sewing them together in grids with checkerboard patterns. This structure connects his series to the traditions of geometric abstraction and grid painting in 20th-century modernist art, and associated structures in architecture and design, as referenced in the work of Leonor Antunes, for instance. However, this exhibition reveals that his artistic process shares affinities with a much broader set of artists across geographies and time periods.

Murillo’s approach to grid painting builds on the legacy of Brasilian Neo-Concretists Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica, emphasising texture and sensuality over precision and geometry, as well as the playful dynamic of order and disorder in the works of Italian artist Alighiero Boetti. His improvisational tendencies trace back to the African American quilting traditions of Rebecca Myles Jones and the use of found objects in the work of Brasilian artists Sonia Gomes and Antonio Tarsis. His paintings also echo experiences of urban life and architecture found in Abraham Cruzvillegas’s arrangements of painted flyers and newspaper sheets sourced from Mexico City and Damián Ortega’s mask made from mosaic tiles from a 1960s apartment building there, and the photographic images of São Paulo by Geraldo de Barros and later by Elisa Sighicelli.

Lastly, Cildo Meireles’s mid-1970s grid of metal and glass reminds audiences of a principle dear to Murillo that reverberates throughout Check Mate(s): that abstract art can allude to political conditions of captivity and freedom without being explicit or didactic.