Howardena Pindell, the Orderly Subversive

The exhibition of Howardena Pindell at White Cube Bermondsey showcases works spanning from the 1960s to her latest pieces, with a focus on the grid motif as both a visual structure and symbolic field. In this array, the grid is not merely a modernist compositional device but a site where personal history, collective memory and material texture converge. The hole-punch works, spray-dot techniques and layered surfaces demonstrate the artist’s intention to turn humble materials and repetitive processes into visually potent and critically charged objects. Pindell disrupts the rigid geometry of the grid by introducing circle, openness, unpredictability: forms that unsettle the schema, trace the presence of body and subjective sensibility in a context that seeks order and system. The artist addresses issues of race, gender and personal trauma without abandoning abstraction, giving back to art an energy that is at once visual, tactile and political. The exhibition highlights how this body of work, though rooted in the language of abstraction, is never neutral - Pindell’s art calls out divisions - material, social, historical - while simultaneously proposing forms of freedom. In that sense, Off the Grid is an invitation to rethink how abstraction looks and is looked at, and to consider how precision can also harbor the potential for subversion.