On the Plane

What do Dürer’s Man Drawing a Reclining Woman, a window in an office block, and a poncho all have in common? At first glance, hardly anything, but upon closer inspection, something quite fundamental, and moreover ubiquitous: rectangular planes. Our world is filled with them, but they occur neither in nature nor in our imagination.

Starting from the picture plane, the invisible ground which enables colour and line to form an image, Manfred Sommer investigates this both elementary and discreet figuration and related phenomena, such as border and seam, edge and frame, grid and square, raster and pixel. He traces their genealogy, which begins in the late Neolithic, when, for the first time, fields start to be ploughed and, later, houses built and fabrics woven according to a rectangular grid—at the same time pictures move from the insides of caves to the white walls of houses, where they will compete with the open windows for the privilege of offering the best view.

On the Plane is a fascinating journey through our orthogonal world, with unexpected detours, e.g. to a painters’ contest in Antiquity, Husserl’s reflections on geometry, or the Bavarian horse ploughing championships. Along the way, we learn to look anew at this aspect of our phenomenal world which we all take for granted.