Tauba Auerbach
1981–
Tauba Auerbach’s “Fold” paintings may initially appear to be photorealistic depictions of new bed sheets freshly removed from their packaging, or pieces of creased paper. To make works such as Untitled (Fold), Auerbach employs the elements essential to painting—canvas, colored pigment, and wooden stretchers—in order to complicate the relationship between representation and reality. She begins by crumpling swathes of canvas, ironing in the folds or pressing them with weights, and leaves the resulting creases to set for several days. She then loosely spreads the canvas out on the studio floor before applying pigment with a house-paint sprayer, holding the device at a raking angle to mimic the effect of natural light falling across a rumpled surface. Afterward, she stretches the fabric taught. As Auerbach has explained, “The resulting flat surface carries a near-perfect record of the canvas’s previous three-dimensional self.” To determine the final composition, she manipulates the placement and size of the stretcher bars to best capture the effects she has generated.
In its final state Untitled (Fold) is a two-dimensional canvas that alludes, through trompe l’oeil techniques, to its past status as a three-dimensional heap of cloth. Auerbach purposely confounds these two senses of time and form in order to “conjure four-dimensional space.” In retaining an alluring, lustrous materiality, her depiction of folds also bridges another duality, allowing the viewer’s perceptions to oscillate between the aesthetic and the conceptual.
Introduction
Tauba Auerbach (born 1981) is a visual artist working in many disciplines including painting, artists' books, sculpture, and weaving who lives and works in New York.
Wikidata identifier
Q15991118
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 22, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, painter
ULAN identifier
500294123
Names
Tauba Auerbach
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 22, 2025.
