TAUBA AUERBACH | Corner 1

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Sweden
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Bergen, Bergen Kunsthall; Malmö, Malmö Konsthall; and Brussels, WIELS Contemporary Art Center; Tauba Auerbach: Tetrachromat, November 2011 - June 2013

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals a minute media accretion towards the top left hand corner and some light handling marks to the right hand corner tip.
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Calming yet confounding, pristinely ordered, and yet redolent of unutterable logical paradoxes, Corner 1 is a paradigmatic case of Tauba Auerbach’s immaculate Weave Paintings: an immensely impressive body of work comprising a sequence of woven canvas monochromes. Displaying a mastery of at once topological theory and tactile praxis, the present work pays tribute to the investigations into the limits of visual combinatorics carried out by Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley. Two different pattern-types, rendered in a dense and meticulous weave, collide with one another along a vertical edge positioned slightly to the left of centre. This edge then bisects obtusely; producing a third pattern-type that occupies the lower section of the work. Our eye is drawn from the borders of the canvas to this point of tripartite intersection: each pattern seems uniform, unchangeable, and yet somehow, inexorably, one becomes the other. There is no visible change to each pattern as this threshold of conversion approaches – a change in nature seems out of the question – and yet somehow, irremediably, each becomes the next. Generating a tension that elevates the work’s two-dimensions to three, implying forms inaccessible to our brains’ contingently-acquired properties, Corner 1 suggests a hierarchy of further, imperceptible dimensions as the Cartesian matrix dissolves into a fluid and unanalysable surface. That the supersensible infinite is so economically and neatly conveyed from within the materials of this woven tapestry is one of the most irresistible aspects of the present work.

Strikingly, the surface veneer of Corner 1 appears almost pixelated; an effect generated by the intricate interlacing of differently-textured strips of fabric. A strange dichotomy is created as the ancient technology of weaving bodies forth the structures of new media. This marriage of the ancient and the new is also enacted by Auerbach’s Fold series, in which the artist – by spray painting the contours of crumpled bundles of canvas before stretching them back out – creates the illusion of entire topographies with a hyper-realistic, CGI-reminiscent precision. This would not be achievable without Auerbach’s mastery of the oldest media. Initially a sign painter, the artist made use of typographical and calligraphic forms from the interior shapes of letters in her earliest abstract works.  Both the Weave and Fold paintings were included in Auerbach’s first major retrospective at the Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2011), which later travelled to both Sweden and Belgium.