Artist Tara Donovan @ Pace Gallery NYC - "Stratagems" Exhibition - Group of sculptures made of found CD-ROM discs

Tara Donovan: Stratagems

Pace Gallery, New York

May 3 – June 15, 2024

Tara Donovan 

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

www.pacegallery.com

Tara Donovan @ Pace Gallery, NYC - Intermediaries

Tara Donovan: Intermediaries

Pace Gallery, New York

Through March 6, 2021

TARA DONOVAN

Sphere, 2020 

© Tara Donovan, courtesy of Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery presents Intermediaries, a solo exhibition bringing together discrete yet interrelated bodies of work created by TARA DONOVAN throughout 2019 and 2020. Based in Tara Donovan’s rigorous investigatory methods and aggregative logic, the exhibition’s drawings, wall-bound pieces, and free-standing sculptures transform commonplace materials into totalities that test our perceptual limits. Intermediaries also articulates the artist’s ever-deepening exploration of art’s capacity to mediate phenomenological encounters that interconnect viewers to one another and their environment. 

The exhibition’s primary concept underscores the structural and material openness of Tara Donovan’s works, which are less to be looked at than looked through. Her art’s capacity to filter and reconfigure vision is most apparent in her free-standing, large-scale sculptures, made of transparent materials that refract light and distort their surrounding space. Stacked Grid (2020), for example, is marked by an orthogonality and monumentality that parallels and heightens the “white cube” of the gallery. Yet it simultaneously thwarts the rationality of the grid that is at the structural core of both the sculpture and its architectural context. Through their aggregation and play with light, the work’s translucent building blocks turn the modernist grid into an evanescent, almost pixelated, entity that, at times, appears labyrinthian. If Minimalism was augured by Frank Stella’s dictum “what you see is what you see,” Donovan, though operating in a minimalist idiom, tacitly questions this foundational emphasis on the self-evidence of vision.

Stacked Grid’s engagement of architecture also points to the intermedial complexity characterizing all of the exhibition’s works. “Medium,” from the Latin medius or “middle,” is at its roots an intermediary, a middle position through which to convey or effect. Monolithic and monochromatic, Tara Donovan’s black, wall-bound and framed sculptures, Apertures (2020), are suspended in between painting and sculpture. From a distance, their austere shape and somber hue emanate a solemnity conducive to a hushed, meditative experience. Up close, however, they exude liveliness. A soft, spectral light, filtered through the works’ strata and enlivened by the viewer’s lateral motion, animates swirling surface patterns, created by hollow stirring sticks that channel light. This light, in turn, subtly, almost imperceptibly, offers an encounter that is psychosomatic as well as visual. In their conflation of darkness and light, absence and presence, stasis and dynamism, these works invite viewers to consider relationships and identities that outstrip simplistic dualities.

Based in a process of elimination and manipulation rather than accumulation, Tara Donovan’s series of twenty-four drawings, titled Screen Drawings (2020), is the result of the artist’s meticulous interventions in the weave of metal screen fragments, which are coated in ink and pressed onto paper. Leveraging as much as disturbing the mathematical regularity of the grid, the drawings attune the eye to subtle shifts in pattern, the ambiguity of figure- ground relations, and instability of form. Housed in Pace’s first floor library, a series of 13 large-scale drawings was similarly created through the use of malleable fiberglass screens, stretched into a variety of patterns. These works’ layered compositions—whose all-over, optical effects range from intense vibrations to aquatic dissolutions—not only suggest movement but also encourage an ambulatory experience that combines seeing and feeling, eye and body. As materials that typically cover windows and hence filter the gaze, the screens forming the field of these two series point to vision as an always mediated phenomenon, even in the moment of creation. To “draw” these works, the artist had to look through and past the screen, translating their textile-like materiality into two-dimensional, graphic markings. By yet again mobilizing the grid, which has long served as the infrastructure of vision in both art (e.g., the perspectival scaffolding of Renaissance painting) and science (treatises on physiological optics are rife with diagrammatic grids), Tara Donovan parses and breaks through this paradigm in the search for new perceptual models, new intermediaries.

Sphere (2020) continues this investigation. Though offering a universally legible form, the massive sculpture complicates its pure geometry through its transparent materials, which bend light and open the work to its surrounds. Its metamorphic effects unfold gradually and indirectly, revealing their full potency when the viewer engages the work in a triangulated encounter with others. As a go-between, the sculpture pushes the solitary phenomenological experiences devised by Minimalism into an interpersonal realm. The authoritative position of omniscience underwriting grids, especially the lattice of perspective, gives way to a kind of dynamic, embodied perception that is optimized when intersected by others in a moment of relational multiplicity.

Additionally, Pace’s website features a selection of approximately six works from the Screen Drawings series, providing detail shots that show the works’ varying structures and formal effects. The digital presentation sheds light on Tara Donovan’s creative process through additional multimedia materials related to the series and contextualizes Tara Donovan’s investigation of the grid by discussing the centrality of this form in modern art through references to the work of past artists.

TARA DONOVAN (b. 1969, New York) creates large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, and prints, utilizing everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. By identifying and exploiting the usually overlooked physical properties of modest, mass-produced goods, Donovan creates ethereal works that challenge our perceptual habits and preconceptions. The atmospheric effects of her art align her with Light and Space artists, such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell, while her commitment to a laborious and site-responsive methodology links her to Postminimalist and Process artists, especially Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris. She has had major survey exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which was also on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, as well as a string of solo projects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, UCLA’s Hammer Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, Smart Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Parrish Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, among others.

PACE GALLERY

540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.pacegallery.com

On the Square: Art Elemental Form

 

More than half a century of artists' meditations

on art history's most elemental form.

 

Josef Albers, Tara Donovan, Tony Feher, Dan Flavin, Alfred Jensen,

Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin,

Louise Nevelson, Ad Reinhardt, Lucas Samaras,

Joel Shapiro, James Siena, Keith Tyson, Corban Walker

 

© JAMES SIENA, Untitled (Iterative Grid), 2009
enamel on aluminum painting 29" x 22-3/4"
Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

 

© JAMES SIENA, Untitled (Iterative grid, second version), 2009
enamel on aluminum painting 19-1/4" x 15-1/8"
Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

 

PaceWildenstein presents a group exhibition that brings together works by some of the most significant artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, paying homage to the square, an elemental form that has helped to define and shape the practice of modern and contemporary art.

The exhibition features sculptures and paintings by 16 artists, including Josef Albers, Tara Donovan, Tony Feher, Dan Flavin, Alfred Jensen, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Ad Reinhardt, Lucas Samaras, Joel Shapiro, James Siena, Keith Tyson, and Corban Walker. On the Square will be on view at 32 East 57th Street gallery from January 8 through February 13, 2010.

In the late 1960s, Sol LeWitt famously articulated the value of the square’s (or the cube’s) “uninteresting” form: “Released from the necessity of being significant in themselves, they can be better used as grammatical devices from which the work may proceed. The use of a square or cube obviates the necessity of inventing other forms and reserves their use for invention.” Indeed, “the square,” perhaps the most stabile, enduring, and neutral form, a New York art critic argued in her homage to this elemental form in 1967, provides a universal standard that is as attractive in its precision and neutrality to the space age as it was to early philosophers and theologians.”

From deconstruction to reconstruction, creation and re-dissolution [1], for the artists included in this exhibition, the square and its permutations have served as a frame for formal invention. Josef Albers, Alfred Jensen, and Ad Reinhardt used the square as the basic organizing framework for their systems of color theory. Josef Albers once explained that he “prefer[red] to think of the square as a stage on which colors play as actors influencing each other—a visual excitement called interaction.” The arrangement of squares within Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square paintings and prints were “a convenient carrier” for his color “instrumentation”—a “container for and a dish to serve [his] cooking in.”

The square was an important defining unit for Minimalists and Conceptualists, who used more objective methodologies with mathematical and logic-based systems.  Artists such as Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt focusing on spatial organization through sculpture, used the box as the basic unit with which to define real space. “The problem is for any artist to find the concatenation that will grow,” Judd once explained. He emptied space of its inessentials and then re-articulated it with carefully placed objects: closed or open, stacked—vertically or horizontally, placed on the floor, hung on the wall, colored in one or multiple colors; the spacing of the units became as important as the pieces themselves.

The square remains an important element for artists working today. The square enables Joel Shapiro to move fluidly between figuration and abstraction, as he conjoins elongated boxes into evocative constructions. With a nod to minimalism, Tony Feher articulates the repetition of the form in stacked plastic beverage crates (Century Plant, 2002), revealing beauty in the simplest gesture.

The exhibition also includes works by James Siena, Tara Donovan, and Keith Tyson, who use subunits to create works resulting in multiple variations. In pieces such as Keith Tyson’s Geno Pheno Sculpture: “Automata No. 2,” the cube serves as the fundamental component for the phenotype generated by the base. The square is the foundation for James Siena’s enamel on aluminum paintings from 2009, as his visual algorithms cascade into dizzying, pulsating patterns. With the square, a jumble of straight pins finds order and clarity in Tara Donovan’s shimmering Untitled (Pins), 2004.

 

[1] Ad Reinhardt, “25 Lines of Words on Art Statement” from It Is (New York), Spring 1958.