ON COURT: William Greiner

William Greiner, Seacrest Beach, Florida, 2011: a weathered court seen head-on, a teal practice wall with a white stripe and a rusted hoop on a board above it, the cracked red and green surface strewn with orange pine needles, grass through the seams, a blue clapboard house behind
William Greiner, Seacrest Beach, Florida, 2011. Inkjet color photograph on archival paper.

A tennis court is a diagram before it is a place. White lines on a coloured ground, and the ground is what gives the court its name: hard, clay, grass. William Greiner made seven of these courts in 2020, in paint and paper on wood, and came back to the subject in 2026 to make two more. ON COURT gathers all nine, together with a photograph he made in Florida in 2011.

It is not at the gallery. Every other Webster Collection exhibition hung at 54½ Lincoln Avenue. This one is at the Forked Lightning Racquet Club, a tennis, pickleball, and padel club on the south side of Santa Fe. Greiner calls it an exhibition celebrating the tennis court.

The exhibition

ON COURT
Paintings, collages, and a photograph by William Greiner
In collaboration with Webster Collection
Forked Lightning Racquet Club, 2398 Brenner Way, Santa Fe
Opened Friday, March 20, 2026, 5:00 to 7:00 pm
The exhibition is currently hanging. The club operates on membership; anyone planning a visit should contact it first.

In the collection’s words

Nine of the ten works are courts, and not one is a picture of a game. Three of them are the same size and the same construction, paint and paper on wood, and each is named for a surface rather than for a place: Hard Court, Clay Court, Grass Court. Black Court and White Court are smaller and drop the paper for paint alone.

Clay Court and Grass Court each show the court from directly overhead, their lines laid in as strips of white paper and their zones filled with collaged fragments, and each is made almost entirely in the colour its surface is named for. Grass is green. Clay is red.

William Greiner, Clay Court, 2020: the same court plan seen from directly overhead, its white lines intact and its zones filled with collaged rectangles in reds, several fragments printed matter with scraps of type, a bee, and a fly still legible
William Greiner, Clay Court, 2020. Acrylic paint and paper on wood.
William Greiner, Grass Court, 2020: a tennis court seen from directly overhead, its lines laid in as white strips and its zones filled with collaged rectangles in greens from near-black to acid yellow, several fragments photographic and legible as foliage
William Greiner, Grass Court, 2020. Acrylic paint and paper on wood.

Two more of the 2020 works take the court apart: Court Fragments, twelve square panels, and ½ Clay Court, titled for the part rather than the whole.

Both of the 2026 works bring something in from outside the paint, tempered glass in Shattered Court and nylon net in Relic Court, and both are titled for what is left after use.

The photograph is the oldest work in the show by nine years and the only one Greiner found rather than made. Its wall label gives it as Seacrest Beach, Florida, and his own title for it is Court, Seacrest FL. The paintings are the plan of a court. The photograph is a cracked surface, a teal practice wall, a rusted basketball hoop, and grass coming up through the seams: what a court becomes when it is left alone. It hangs in a building with twenty-seven courts outside it.

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