Tauba Auerbach
Saturday, 17 December 2011
Work from her show at Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen.
“In Tauba Auerbach’s work traditional distinctions between image, dimensionality and content collapse. Surface, specifically the larger issues surrounding topology, has been a central concern in her recent paintings, drawings, photographs and artist books. Auerbach interweaves discordant positions such as disorder and order, readability and abstraction, permeability and solidity – phenomena that are usually viewed as incompatible – into unified surfaces and volumes.
The title of the exhibition plays on the notion of ‘tetrachromatic’ vision. People normally perceive the world around them trichromatically (in three colours). Humans have three types of receptor for the perception of colour with varying sensitivities: red, green and blue. A new theory exists that there may be a small percentage of people (only women) who have a fourth colour receptor, which makes them ‘tetrachromatic’. In order to play on such ideas of a fourth component which, if it could be proven, would radically change our view of the world, Auerbach employs two analogies in this exhibition – the spatial (the idea of a fourth dimension) and the spectral (a fourth colour spectrum).
Tauba Auerbach has long worked with different types of book production. Recently these have developed into independent sculptural works that continue Auerbach’s research on multidimensionality and the importance of colour for spatiality. She presents several new book sculptures in this exhibition, and in a way these function as manuals for thinking about the project by constantly revolving around the question “How can we imagine what is impossible to sense?””
See the complete press release and more pictures from the exhibition at Contemporary Daily and Bergen Kunsthall.