Grundriss · the ground plan
Art | Canvas
A nine-foot canvas of sponge-stamped black: an arc of squares sweeping across the bare ground, blocks and bars set around it like a plan seen from above.
- Medium
- black paint pressed on with a sponge and laid on heavy, on cotton duck, 9 x 4 ft
- Category
- Art | Canvas
- Year
- 2026
Grundriss
the ground plan
Grundriss is the German word for the ground plan, the drawing of a place seen from directly above. On a canvas of raw cotton duck nine feet long, black paint is pressed on with a sponge, one square at a time, and laid on heavy where it needs to stand. A wide arc of stamped squares sweeps from the top left down to the bottom edge. Around it sit blocks: a dense stamped field at the lower left, a solid black square with a small window cut into it, a ladder of torn stripes, a scatter of short dabs, dry-brushed bands, and black bars along the right and bottom edges.
Seen from above, it reads as a plan. The arc is a road or a river. Each stamp is a house, a car, a person. The solid square with its one window is a building, and the bars at the edge are where the map stops. The bare canvas between them is the ground nobody has drawn on yet. A plan is drawn before anyone lives there, by someone who will not. Here it is made with a kitchen sponge, and each mark is a single press of the hand, so the city is built one press at a time, the way the real one was.
The stamps along the arc, and the heavy black standing proud.
At nine feet it is the size of a wall, and it asks for one: a long plain wall, with the arc read at eye height and the bars at the edges meeting the room, so the map ends where the room begins. The elevation traces every mark at its true place, which turns the painting back into the drawing it resembles.
In the room, and the elevation of every mark.
The plan is drawn before anyone lives there. This one was pressed by hand.
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