For the past twenty-five years, Cordy Ryman’s work has been rooted in manipulating materials across a wide range of scale, including wall, floor, and corner works and installations. He notes, “A lot of my work is about reactions—reactions to elements within materials, between different combined elements within a work, and between the materials and the space around it.” Painting primarily on wood allows him the versatility to expand the work’s viability. The result provides a consistency in form and practice that lends itself to evolving motifs that are only recognizable overtime. The process and method that he has developed can be viewed as a constellation of constant and careful reiteration, like connected branches on a tree. 
 
Grid Block (2021) is a large-scale installation consisting of twenty-five equal sized square parts assembled into a grid. Evenly spaced apart in rows of five, each part is composed of wood and painted on one or all five sides of the structure. For Ryman, the grid is a common solution that he has been familiar with for all of his life and has returned to multiple times throughout his art practice. He says, “To me, when I’m working through these sets of solutions, the looks and forms have a very powerful feeling of order and home. I experience it as an iconic archetype, totemic, and somehow spiritual.”
 
Ryman has explored the grid system in other works, including a smaller-scale installation, Trace Dot Grid 25 in 2019.