Tara Donovan: Stratagems
Pace Gallery, New York
May 3 – June 15, 2024
Stratagem I, 2024
© Tara Donovan, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace presents an exhibition of new work by Tara Donovan at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. The show, titled Stratagems, spotlights a group of sculptures made entirely of found, scavenged, and upcycled CD-ROM discs. Coinciding with Frieze New York, the artist’s presentation at the gallery is complemented by a Pace Live performance from choreographer Kim Brandt.
Known for her process- and system-based work across sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking, Tara Donovan often explores the talismanic qualities of everyday materials and objects, from buttons, Styrofoam cups, pencils, and pins to readymade screens and Slinky toys. Drawing on the formal language of Minimalism and Postminimalism, Tara Donovan’s works both use and mis-use such nontraditional materials, transforming them into visually dazzling compositions without obliterating their fundamental essences or histories as objects from everyday life. Through acts of accumulation, aggregation, and iteration, she transmutes her materials into shapeshifting works of art, which explore the possibilities—and limits—of human perception.
Marking her eleventh solo show with Pace, Stratagems is the first exhibition dedicated to Tara Donovan’s three- dimensional sculptures mounted in New York since 2021. Comprising 11 new sculptures, the show will be presented on the gallery’s seventh floor, which features floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Chelsea skyline. Built atop concrete pedestals, each of Donovan’s vertically-oriented sculptures is composed of stacks of CDs, varying in height from seven to ten feet tall. Breathing new life into the banal and outmoded medium of the compact disc, these works will be activated by the natural light that floods the gallery space. Depending on the time of day and the viewer’s perspective, a range of optical effects unfold across the refractive surfaces of the works. Mutable and seemingly alive, Tara Donovan’s latest sculptures respond directly to the presence of the viewer’s body as it traverses space, reflecting her deep interest in the relationship between perceptual nuances and material transfigurations. At the same time, these works invite the viewer to contemplate the transformation of an obsolete medium—once used for the storage and transmission of digital information—into a prism for embodied experience.
During Frieze week in New York, choreographer Kim Brandt will stage a performance with six dancers amid Tara Donovan’s exhibition at Pace. Presented by Pace Live—the gallery’s interdisciplinary platform for live art performances, musical acts, conversations, and other events—Kim Brandt’s performance will share certain affinities with Tara Donovan’s work and riff on the sculptures in the show, developing through an accumulation of scores that invites dancers to explore spiraling as generative movement. Kim Brandt, who has previously presented her work at MoMA PS1 and SculptureCenter in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and many other institutions, has developed a practice that investigates the body as a dynamic material constantly negotiating context-specific relationships to time and space. Further details about her performance at the gallery will be announced in due course.
Stratagems will open during the final days of When Forms Come Alive, a group show at the Hayward Gallery in London featuring Tara Donovan’s work, on view through May 6.
For over 20 years, TARA DONOVAN (b. 1969, Flushing, New York) has created large-scale installations, sculptures and drawings that utilize everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Known for her commitment to process, she has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects. Tara Donovan’s many accolades include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award (2008); and the first annual Calder Prize (2005), among others. For over a decade, numerous museums have mounted solo exhibitions of Tara Donovan’s work including the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2004 and 2009); Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2006); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2007-08); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2008); Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana (2010); the Milwaukee Art Museum, Illinois (2012); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2013), Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, Germany (2014); Parrish Museum, Watermill, New York (2015); Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, Scotland (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Colorado (2018); and the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Illinois (2019). Her work is held in the collections of major institutions such as the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Pace Gallery has represented Tara Donovan since 2005. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
PACE GALLERY NEW YORK
540 West 25th Street, New York City
