Tauba Auerbach

Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, Europe
Private Collection, New York

This work is in excellent condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling along the edges of the canvas. Under Ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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"I probably think about higher spatial dimensions more than any other aspect of my practice. At the root of my interest is the question of what consciousness is: what it's made of and what its limitations might be. As creatures that operate in three dimensions, what capacity do we have to conceive of a dimension that's beyond, or even coiled within, the space that we experience?” Tauba Auerbach

Tauba Auerbach's sensational Fold paintings have received widespread critical acclaim since their debut in 2009. Minimal and abstract yet immediately recognizable in their distinctive luminosity and delicately textured surfaces, the Fold paintings are rapturing in their elegant beauty as well as the psychological intrigue and optical manipulations central to Auerbach’s artistic approach and practice. In the present work, peaks of diffused blue, green and soft red pigment seem to crest and plummet across a completely smooth canvas surface, miming the sculptural effect of a crumpled cloth. Executed in 2010, the present work is emblematic of the luminous, delicately textured Fold paintings that operate in the liminal space between painting and sculpture, an indeterminate area that the artist has coined the ‘2.5^th dimension’. In doing so, Auerbach positions her practice at the apogee of a long art historical lineage that has explored this mysterious zone, from the luxurious painted folds in the drapery of Renaissance paintings to Lucio Fontana’s revolutionary Tagli in which the artist innovatively punctured the surface of the canvas and dissolved the barrier between painting and sculpture. Attesting to the importance of the Fold paintings, other examples are held in the permanent collections of numerous prestigious institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

It is difficult not to be drawn in by the rich surface and suggestive textures of Untitled (Fold). The realization that such voluminous and undulating folds are in fact a perfectly flat surface distinguishes the work as a masterpiece of Contemporary trompe-l’oeil. Auerbach’s method consists of first pressing and folding the canvas, then restretching it after a network of impressions have been achieved. The raw canvas is then sprayed with industrial paint, often of a single dominant hue with metallic tones, at several angles that ultimately result in a fascinating composition of tonal patterns that give off the optical illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface. All Fold paintings have a distinctive pattern and chromatic scheme systematically arranged and paired by the artist. 

Interested in math, physics and linguistics, Auerbach has focused her artistic output on the exploration of spatial dimensions and perception. Through painting patterns, symmetry and symbols, the artist attempts to reveal new dimensional richness both within and beyond the limits of perception. According to the artist, the disciplines of art, science, math and language are interconnected in that they ultimately converge into one unifying field in how they shape human perception and experience of the world – affecting not only our spatial perception but also our color recognition. Topology, the mathematical study of shapes, has long been a preoccupation of Auerbach, prompting the artist to frame a system of formulas and methods aimed at challenging conventional logic and perceptions of space. As evidenced in Untitled (Fold), the artist successfully stretches our limits of perception by essentially obliterating any difference between two and three dimensional fields.

The allure of Auerbach’s paintings reside in their ability to challenge our perception, expectation and logic, ultimately inspired by the artist’s desire to deconstruct existing assumptions. Her works, as evidenced in Untitled (Fold), are wondrous mosaics of colors that are at once both cerebral and sensual. As Auerbach herself proclaims, “I think I always make work about logic in some way. Taking things that are assumed to be linear and making them double back on themselves or knotting them up…posing questions to myself about the way I was taught to think and reason. Posing questions about the structure of a question. For a long time, language was sort of the medium I was using to try these things out, but now I’m working almost entirely abstractly. There is less opportunity to take this work literally, and I think that shifts the focus of inquiry onto the viewer in a good way” (Tauba Auerbach in conversation with Andrea Hyde).