Beschreibung:

Tauba Auerbach Untitled (Fold) XV 2010 acrylic on canvas 152.4 x 121.9 cm. (60 x 48 in.) Signed, titled and dated 'UNTITLED (FOLD) XV TAUBA AUERBACH 2010' on the overlap.
Provenance Sutton Lane, Paris Private Collection, Paris Private collection NY Exhibited Paris, Sutton Lane, What Where: Tauba Auerbach Alex Hubbard Nathan Hylden & Zak Prekop, 6 February - 3 March 2010 Catalogue Essay 'For the last two years I have tried to conjure four-dimensional space. The Fold paintings are my effort to construct a portal through which to summon - or at least imagine - this inaccessible hyper-spatial reality.' Tauba Auerbach In Tauba Auerbach’s work, the artist interweaves binary oppositions typically viewed as incompatible – such as permeability and solidity, order and disorder - into unified surfaces. The series of Fold paintings demonstrate the artist’s attempt to challenge the conventional ways visual and perceptual information is portrayed. Elegant and methodical in its rendering, Untitled (Fold) XV, 2010, breaks down traditional distinctions between image, dimensionality and content, forcing the viewer to confront the limitations between two supposedly discrete states: flatness and three-dimensionality. A modern day ‘trompe l’oeil’, the present lot leads the viewer to believe they are observing a three-dimensional relief, as opposed to a two-dimensional work. By firstly manipulating the large piece of blank canvas into various configurations through rolling and folding, Auerbach was able to produce the optical illusion by laying the canvas out flat, and then painting its surface with an industrial spray gun aimed at three different angles. The resultant pleats that span horizontally, vertically and diagonally across the canvas, fold and unfold, gather and flatten, crease and straighten with captivating rhythm. The canvas itself seems to pull together, as if releasing itself altogether from its supporting wooden frame. Looking at the work from a distance, our tactile sense is stimulated, as we expect the surface of creased paper. Upon approach however, the viewer realises that the canvas is actually taut: rigidly tightened over the stretcher. Infusing an object which is seemingly flat with volume and motion is where the ingenuity behind Auerbach’s practice lies. Occupying an impossible space between the second and third dimension, the work is in a state which the artist herself defines as the 2.5th dimension. Certainly, Untitled (Fold) XV, raises crucial questions about the nature of depicting a three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface, and in particular, the relationship between abstraction and representation. It is exemplary of the artist’s innovative interconnection of a constructive approach and fundamental themes relating to the history of art, which enables the artist to present the viewer with an alternation between flatness and dimension, treating the canvas as though it were a topographical study on the surface of the canvas. The illusory nature of the painting is reminiscent of a similar effect achieved in Rupert Stingel’s Untitled, 1993, an artist who, in much the same way as Auerbach, questions the conventions of art and innovates his viewers’ experience of it, whether it be on vertical, horizontal or abstract planes. Indeed, oscillating between a flat surface and a three-dimensional object, Auerbach’s composition is an exquisite and invigorating response to her continuing fascination with an attempt to fuse contrary states of order and chaos into a cohesive whole. Read More