And along with the cakes and cheese, he has painted incandescent, slightly antic landscapes, too, the views turned into complex, almost abstract grids of irregular patterns, seen from a bird's-eye perspective.

Each image is followed by an abstract grid of the actual colors in the image picked up by a computer.

Dark, dense, seemingly abstract pen-and-ink grids turn out to be vast underground storage racks set in abandoned coal mines.

Someone who cottoned more to pop culture was Mondrian, his abstract grids taking on the jazzy buzz of New York City streets.

Early subjects included a loudspeaker, a lampshade and nearly abstract grids of windowpanes, as well as empty bars and cafes.

They talked about the ways in which strings constituted the very fabric of space-time itself, rather than being replacements for points in some absolute abstract grid.

The underlying beat of any piece of music functions as "an abstract grid without which you would be sliding around in nothing."

Another sought-after painting was Ms. Martin's "Drift of Summer" (1965), a white abstract grid.

To interpret the New York team's proposal as a repetition of the all-too-familiar abstract modernist grid is to misunderstand its complexity.

And on each panel, under the lunar image, is an abstract grid of dots: it has the look of a language and is a reminder of humankind's age-old pursuit of interpreting the moon.