0
News
April 24, 2025
Now Representing – Tauba Auerbach
Esther Schipper is delighted to announce the representation of Tauba Auerbach.
Tauba Auerbach works in multiple media and formats. Employing practices such as marbling or glass-making, as well as drawing, painting, photography and installation, the artist has often invented specialized instruments and novel techniques for specific series.
Auerbach's work explores a parallel, embodied history of understanding how knowledge is embedded in form. Their research into mathematics, science, or quantum physics is transformed into works that make concepts palpable. Observing how foam and soap bubbles form, how liquids or viscous materials flow, or how sand self-organizes is on the same level as knowing their properties at the cellular, molecular, or quantum level. Abstract notions become images, objects, and installations that convey the tension inherent in knowledge, its often suppressed contradiction of being many things: cerebral and subjective, warm and cold, intuited and felt.
Gesture plays an important role in the process: disciplined in near perfect repetition of lines or given form in paintings executed with self-styled tools and instruments, Auerbach alters the modernist notion of its expressiveness. To the artist, the body is a tool, thought literally incorporated in its materiality and lived experience, in practice and muscle memory. A question that lingers in Auerbach’s work, then, is how our own corporeality influences behavior and with it form: A drawn line can be full of confidence or hesitation. Their work reveals the way knowledge and human presence have always been joined in form—traces of which run through art in pattern from the Greek meander to twentieth-century Gestalt and Mandelbrot fractals, or in the intuitive structural understanding inherent in certain traditional techniques, such as weaving, lace-making, or beading.
Order can be both reassuring and disturbing, knowledge communicated by intuiting rules. Auerbach’s works know this and their small disturbances in pattern or rhythm subtly undermine the promise of objectivity associated with repetition and order. How these paradoxical associations can coexist in our perception is a central theme of Auerbach’s work and something they want us to take out into the world.
Their first exhibition with Esther Schipper will take place in September 2025 on occasion of Berlin Art Week.
Tauba Auerbach was born 1981, in San Francisco, California. They studied Visual Arts at Stanford University, California. The artist lives and works in New York.
In 2013 the artist started Diagonal Press, a specialty press to hold their ongoing typography and book-making practice.
In 2008, Auerbach received the Eureka Fellowship at the Fleischhacker Foundation, and in the same year won the SECA Art Awards at SFMOMA. In 2011, they became an Artists Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. In 2016, they won the Queen Sonja Print Award. In 2024 Auerbach was commissioned to present a permanent installation, Foam, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s Art Park in Guarene.
Auerbach’s solo exhibitions include: Tide, Fridericianum, Kassel (2023); S v Z, SFMoMA, San Francisco (2021); Tauba Auerbach: Current, The Artist’s Institute at Hunter College, New York (2019); Flow Separation, Public Art Fund, New York Harbor, New York (2018); OOOoooOOO. 19 flags for 019, 019, Ghent (2018); INDUCTION: Tauba Auerbach + Elaine Radigue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (two-person exhibition, 2018); Diagonal Press, Stevenson Library, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2017); The New Ambidextrous Universe, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2014); Tetrachomat, Bergen Kunsthall, traveled to Malmö Konsthall, Wiels Contemporary Art Center (2011); A Book is Not An X, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, East Hampton (2011); Quarry, Whitney Museum Construction Site Installation, New York, NY (2010); New Year, Western Bridge, Seattle (2010); Here and Now/And Nowhere, Deitch Projects, New York (2009); Passengers, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2008); All Time, All the Time, San Francisco Art Commission, San Francisco (2005).
