Ortuzar is pleased to present a solo booth dedicated to works by Mary Grigoriadis at Independent 20th Century 2026, marking the artist's first presentation with the gallery. The booth focuses on paintings from the 1970s, a pivotal decade in Grigoriadis's practice during which she developed her distinctive visual language of richly textured geometric forms juxtaposed with expanses of exposed raw linen. By pairing monumental paintings with smaller related works, the presentation traces the evolution of an approach that synthesized decoration, geometry, and abstraction into a singular painterly vocabulary.

Emerging in the New York art world in the 1970s, Grigoriadis drew on ornamental traditions from across cultures, reconfiguring them within the language of hard-edge abstraction. A founding member of the all-female, artist-run cooperative gallery A.I.R. and a leading figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, she challenged the hierarchies of modernist painting by embracing the decorative as a site of formal innovation and feminist expression. Her early exhibitions at A.I.R. introduced the luminous, symmetrically structured paintings that became the foundation of her practice. Over the course of the decade, these works evolved into increasingly dynamic, asymmetrical compositions, reflecting an ever more expansive approach to pattern, color, and form.

Grigoriadis's methodical approach is rooted in standardized canvas sizes: 12 x 12 inches and 66 x 66 inches. These dimensions were determined not only by the constraints of her studio but also by her desire to maintain an intimate, one-to-one relationship with the painted surface. Grigoriadis rejected scale for its own sake, citing Flemish miniatures as evidence that a small painting could possess as much power and complexity as a monumental one.

Each painting begins with a layer of white acrylic gesso to seal the linen, followed by successive applications of oil paint arranged in non-objective patterns. At various stages, Grigoriadis sands back earlier layers to create a more receptive ground for subsequent applications. Built up through as many as eight to ten passes, the paintings deepen in both color and material density over time. In some works from this period, she incorporates acrylic paint to accelerate the layering process, recognizing that oil alone dried too slowly to sustain her working method. These richly textured passages are counterbalanced by expanses of exposed raw linen.

Throughout this body of work, Grigoriadis drew on her personal history, with titles and motifs that reference the visual culture of the Greek Orthodox Church that shaped her early experience. Paintings such as Giotto’s Oranges (1974) and Virginia’s Dawn (1975) exemplify her approach to non-objective painting through bilaterally symmetrical compositions of zigzags, trapezoids, and spheres. Evoking ornamented architecture, mosaics, and sacred spaces, these works privilege formal relationships, rhythmic repetition, and material presence over narrative. By the end of the decade, works such as Ravenna Eve (c. 1979-1980) shift toward asymmetry, with cascading chevrons, triangles, and rectangles extending beyond the picture plane to suggest fragments of larger architectural structures.

Mary Grigoriadis (b. 1942, Jersey City, New Jersey) has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and her work has since been featured in major group exhibitions, including “Making Their Mark: Women Artists from the Shah Garg Collection” at the Shah Garg Foundation, New York (2024), and “Artists Choose Parrish” at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York (2023). In 2019, her paintings were included in the landmark survey “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985,” presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Her work is held in prominent public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire; Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, Florida; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York.