NEW YORK, NY.- Tauba Auerbach is presenting a family of new works in various media, reflecting on currents and concurrence. These will include a new generation of pointillist paintings depicting liquid foams photographed through a microscope. Hand-painted dots gather into refractive images on sprayed panels that float slightly off the wall. Earlier works in the series looked at foam’s architecture; these focus on its interaction with light.
Of the material, Tauba has said: “Foam often exists at an edge, like the edge of the ocean or the edge of a glass. It’s the unruly boundary between two domains (liquid and air), where order in the traditional sense breaks down, and a new type of organization emerges. There is no grid, no overarching structure or repeating pattern, but instead, a set of tendencies causing certain geometric relationships to arise and recur.”
The exhibition also includes groups of photographs recording hot and cold currents of water with a heat-sensitive camera attachment. Presented in a new, small format and primarily in black and white, they reveal variations and movements invisible to the naked eye. Crystalline, stochastic sounds are produced by glass chimes suspended around the gallery. Finally, pairs of moving sculptures gently rotate in relation to one another.
Across these works, turbulence takes a fruitful and coordinated form.
Tauba Auerbach studies structure and connectivity on the microscopic to the cosmic scale. Building on crafts in many disciplines, they often invent tools and techniques to induce or exaggerate material behaviors. Their work moves freely between painting, weaving, glass, photography, video, calligraphy and musical instrument design. In 2013, Tauba started Diagonal Press, to hold their ongoing typography and book-making practice.
In 2018, the Public Art Fund organized the artist’s acclaimed public project, Flow Separation, in New York Harbor. Tauba’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou, among others. In 2021, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented S v Z — a 17 year survey of Tauba’s work. Significant one-person exhibitions have also been presented at the Fridericianum, Kassel (2023-2024); Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2018); the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2014); and Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, which traveled to venues in Sweden and Belgium (2011-2012).
