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Lot Essay
Untitled Fold Painting VI (2009) is a brightly-rendered work from Tauba Auerbach’s seminal series of Fold paintings. More than two metres in height, the glorious saffron-coloured surface appears uniformly monochrome from a distance: up close, it reveals subtle streaks, veins and ripples of negative space. Born of the artist’s signature working method, this effect is achieved by spraying acrylic paint at an angle onto a creased, unstretched canvas. After the canvas is stretched taut, it creates the illusion of folds caught in gentle raking light. ‘The resulting flat surface carries a near-perfect imprint of the canvas’ previous three-dimensional self’, Auerbach explains: ‘the surface still appears wrinkled or folded. This is my take on trompe-l’oeil or traditional realist painting, one that relies on strategy rather than virtuosity’ (T. Auerbach, quoted in Folds, exh. cat. Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen 2012, p. 105). Enigmatic and technically rigorous, Untitled Fold Painting VI is a striking example of Auerbach’s ability to tease the viewer’s eye, prompting us to come closer to examine its illusory façade.
Executed in 2009, the year in which the series was inaugurated, Untitled Fold Painting VI marks one of the earliest examples of Auerbach’s Fold paintings. These works quickly propelled the artist onto the international stage, leading to their participation in a number of significant institutional exhibitions the following year, including at the Museum of Modern Art PS1, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the New Museum, New York; Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin; and the Whitney Biennial, New York. Exposing the marks of its own making, and simultaneously toying with our perceptual capacity, Untitled Fold Painting VI exemplifies the series’ pictorial tension. It presents a mystical domain that straddles painting and sculpture, and probes the limits of our visual consciousness.
Auerbach’s practice is steeped in a myriad of art historical references. Most prominently, the Fold paintings can be aligned with the tradition of trompe l’oeil, their hallucinogenic expanses recalling the depictions of fabric by Dutch and Italian Old Masters. By manipulating their surfaces like drapery, Auerbach also recalls the artistic method of Morris Louis, who made his ‘Veils’ by pouring dilute pigment into creased, loosely-stapled canvases, and the staining methods of Helen Frankenthaler. Untitled Fold Painting VI quietly evokes these influences, while breaking new ground in an ongoing historical tendency to dismantle the dimensionality of painting. A splendid pictorial mirage, the work exemplifies Auerbach’s ability to meld fact and fiction, evoking their fascination with ‘collapsing order and chaos into a unified state’ (T. Auerbach, quoted in D. Kazanjian, ‘Optic Nerve’, American Vogue, January 2009, p. 141).
Executed in 2009, the year in which the series was inaugurated, Untitled Fold Painting VI marks one of the earliest examples of Auerbach’s Fold paintings. These works quickly propelled the artist onto the international stage, leading to their participation in a number of significant institutional exhibitions the following year, including at the Museum of Modern Art PS1, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the New Museum, New York; Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin; and the Whitney Biennial, New York. Exposing the marks of its own making, and simultaneously toying with our perceptual capacity, Untitled Fold Painting VI exemplifies the series’ pictorial tension. It presents a mystical domain that straddles painting and sculpture, and probes the limits of our visual consciousness.
Auerbach’s practice is steeped in a myriad of art historical references. Most prominently, the Fold paintings can be aligned with the tradition of trompe l’oeil, their hallucinogenic expanses recalling the depictions of fabric by Dutch and Italian Old Masters. By manipulating their surfaces like drapery, Auerbach also recalls the artistic method of Morris Louis, who made his ‘Veils’ by pouring dilute pigment into creased, loosely-stapled canvases, and the staining methods of Helen Frankenthaler. Untitled Fold Painting VI quietly evokes these influences, while breaking new ground in an ongoing historical tendency to dismantle the dimensionality of painting. A splendid pictorial mirage, the work exemplifies Auerbach’s ability to meld fact and fiction, evoking their fascination with ‘collapsing order and chaos into a unified state’ (T. Auerbach, quoted in D. Kazanjian, ‘Optic Nerve’, American Vogue, January 2009, p. 141).