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Lot Essay
Tauba Auerbach's elegant and methodical compositions deconstruct the conventional ways visual and perceptual information is conveyed. Through a combination of meticulous execution and optical sleight of hand, her canvases appear to exist somewhere between two dimensions-a point between the second and third dimension and a place where the physical and metaphysical meet, with spectacular results.
With her Weaves, Auerbach builds the image contained within these paintings from the ground up. Again utilizing the technique of trompe-l'oeil, she uses only the woven structure to articulate surfaces, spaces and images. In some of the works she depicts three planes meeting in a corner and in others rays of light, heat waves and surface ruptures.
When asked what reaction she hopes an audience will elicit from work, Auerbach replies: "confusion and then clarity...and then confusion again" (T. Auerbach, quoted by L. Turvey, "Art in Review," ArtForum , September 2009, p. 230). With much of her work by emphatically avoiding narrative and making the surface itself the subject of the work, Auerbach is drawing attention to the illusory nature of painting itself. Operating in a gap between conceptual, graphic and abstract art and combining it with a technological savvy, Auerbach has interwoven apparently irreconcilable phenomena into a cohesive surface, creating a beautiful and beguiling response to her ongoing fascination with 'collapsing order and chaos into a unified state.' (T. Auerbach, quoted in D. Kazanjian. 'Optic Nerve', American Vogue, January 2009, p. 141).
Tauba Auerbach's work exists in a rarely explored, ambiguous territory, in which the artist intersects mathematical, logical and art historical concerns. With her work she weaves together disorder and order, readability and abstraction, permeability and solidity - all phenomena that have been familiar to artists for generations but are qualities that are usually presented as being incompatible. Auerbach, takes these qualities, and interlaces them into a rich tapestry that unifies both surface and space.
With her Weaves, Auerbach builds the image contained within these paintings from the ground up. Again utilizing the technique of trompe-l'oeil, she uses only the woven structure to articulate surfaces, spaces and images. In some of the works she depicts three planes meeting in a corner and in others rays of light, heat waves and surface ruptures.
When asked what reaction she hopes an audience will elicit from work, Auerbach replies: "confusion and then clarity...and then confusion again" (T. Auerbach, quoted by L. Turvey, "Art in Review," ArtForum , September 2009, p. 230). With much of her work by emphatically avoiding narrative and making the surface itself the subject of the work, Auerbach is drawing attention to the illusory nature of painting itself. Operating in a gap between conceptual, graphic and abstract art and combining it with a technological savvy, Auerbach has interwoven apparently irreconcilable phenomena into a cohesive surface, creating a beautiful and beguiling response to her ongoing fascination with 'collapsing order and chaos into a unified state.' (T. Auerbach, quoted in D. Kazanjian. 'Optic Nerve', American Vogue, January 2009, p. 141).
Tauba Auerbach's work exists in a rarely explored, ambiguous territory, in which the artist intersects mathematical, logical and art historical concerns. With her work she weaves together disorder and order, readability and abstraction, permeability and solidity - all phenomena that have been familiar to artists for generations but are qualities that are usually presented as being incompatible. Auerbach, takes these qualities, and interlaces them into a rich tapestry that unifies both surface and space.