Tauba Auerbach - New Now New York Tuesday, February 28, 2017 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    The artist, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
    Whitney Museum New Building Project, Sotheby's, New York, May 15, 2013, lot 401
    Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    “I probably think about higher spatial dimensions more than any other aspect of my practice… As creatures that operate in three dimensions, what capacity do we have to conceive of a dimension that's beyond, or even coiled within, the space that we experience?” –Tauba Auerbach

    Beginning in 2012, Tauba Auerbach began her ongoing series of Weave paintings, each a beautifully texturized woven canvas. Immediately following the artist’s Fold series, conceived in 2009, the Weave works continue the artist’s exploration of what she has coined the “2.5th Dimension”, one which exists somewhere between what lies in front of us and the space in which we exist. In the present lot, Slice V from 2013, the viewer is presented with not an optical illusion as in the Fold paintings, but rather a palpable woven surface that oscillates between projection and recession, juxtaposing light and dark with positive and negative spaces. The resulting canvas is both painting and sculpture, composed of repetitive strips of canvas, a painting’s foundation. As Auerbach explained of the series’ conception, “The canvas was something that I had taken for granted… I stopped thinking about other dimensions as "out there" and started wondering if they were within everything else in some way. I felt a need to burrow into the structure of the plane, to take it apart and put it back together in a more deliberate, dynamic way.” (Tauba Auerbach, quoted in Courtney Fiske, “Tauba Auerbach’s Peripheral Visions”, Art in America, June 21, 2012, online)

    An integral body within her oeuvre, the Weave works were included in her major solo institutional exhibition, Tauba Auerbach: Tetrachromat, which began at Bergen Kunsthall in 2011 and concluded at the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels in 2013. Slice V is a stunning example from the series, rendered in a multi-planar ivory canvas strips. Each strip alternates on top and beneath the next, as if coexisting in the new dimension that Auerbach has created. By harkening back to the traditional craft of weaving, the artist uniquely bridges the past and the present in her own futuristic space. “Weaving is one of our oldest technologies,” she has stated, “but it has an inherent esthetic and structural link to our newest, digital technologies. That continuity excited me.” (Tauba Auerbach, quoted in Courtney Fiske, “Tauba Auerbach’s Peripheral Visions”, Art in America, June 21, 2012, online)

15

Slice V

signed, titled and dated "TAUBA AUERBACH 2013 SLICE V" on the stretcher bars
woven canvas
60 x 45 in. (152.4 x 114.3 cm.)
Executed in 2013.

Estimate
$300,000 - 400,000 

Sold for $358,000

Contact Specialist
Rebekah Bowling
Head of Sale
New York
+ 1 212 940 1250

New Now

New York Auction 28 February 2017