Tauba Auerbach

Standard Oslo, Oslo

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2013

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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While one can easily discern a myriad of art historical reference points, from Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin through to Op artists Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely and even Rudolf Stingel, Tauba Auerbach’s Façade Split Ray I is little concerned with its place in art history. “To tell you the truth”, she says, “I think much more about math than about art history. I don’t have that sense that I am or that I want to be advancing a particular historical thread” (Tauba Auerbach cited in: Courtney Fiske, ‘Tauba Auerbach’s Peripheral Visions’, Art in America, 21 June 2012, online). As such, her work resists easy categorisation in its defiance from art historical assimilation. She goes on to say, “I probably think about higher spatial dimensions more than any other aspect of my practice” (Ibid.).

 It is here, in the space between dimensions that we can start to pin Auerbach’s elusively creative practice down. A conceptual continuation on from her celebrated Fold paintings (in which she creases then spray paints her canvases before stretching them), her woven canvases are as much a mathematical enquiry into the limitations of Cartesian spatial perception, as they are essays in formal beauty. Façade Split Ray I with its undulating weaves and pixelated aesthetic in Auerbach’s own words “soften the distinction between 2D and 3D states of being… it could efface, or at least imply the possibility of effacing, a similar distinction between 3D and beyond” (Ibid.). This is a painting for a post-internet age. It speaks not just to today’s zeitgeist but to the audiences of tomorrow too. In a world increasing ruled by science and technology, rather than turn her back on it Auerbach has embraced it, layering her art with a conceptual framework until now alien to art and art making. Yet for all her continual disenfranchisement of her artistic forfathers, she has not cut herself off totally from the past. “Weaving is one of our oldest technologies”, she contemplates, “but it has an inherent esthetic and structural link to our newest, digital technologies. That continuity excited me” (Ibid.).