Tauba Auerbach brilliantly melds the techniques of one of our oldest technologies with the aesthetics of digital forms in Ray IV, 2012. Part of the artist’s Weave series and similar to works such as Miter, Ray,Trans Ray, 2015, in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, Ray IV consists of woven strips of canvas that delicately recess and emerge, interlacing to create a surface that looks pixelated. In the series, the artist identifies a continuity between these ancient and contemporary forms, describing “an inherent esthetic and structural link,” from weaving to “our newest, digital technologies.”i Expertly crafted, Auerbach created Ray IV with the utmost precision and attention to detail while also retaining a distinctive handmade quality that proves essential to the work’s conceptual gravitas. Executed with raw canvas, the present work finds the intersection of forms that are at once timeless and cutting-edge.
"Auerbach deconstructs the canvas by literalizing its form."
—Courtney FiskeThe tessellating, digitally influenced moire of Ray IV stems from Auerbach’s interest in logic and mathematical structures. Musing on her impetus for the Weave series, Auerbach recounts: “I became really interested in binary code as a linguistic structure. That catapulted me into thinking about binaries in general as logic-structures, and eventually I landed on the binary between flatness and not-flatness. The “Weave” paintings are a nod to this sort of logic."ii In teasing out the poetic beauty in these coded forms, Auerbach’s Weave works find a kinship with the instructional wall drawings and gridded sculptures of Sol LeWitt, and even the optical explorations of Bridget Riley.
Ray IV is distinguished by its balance of soft and hard qualities. Its mesmerizing pattern derives from the rigidity of its plaits in service of the overarching “ray.” Meanwhile, in a natural, ecru textile, the work is also comfortably domestic, thriving in the subtlety of its three-dimensional composition. It is experimentative and algorithmic, intimate and ageless.
i Tauba Auerbach, quoted in Courtney Fiske, “Tauba Auerbach’s Peripheral Visions”, Art in America, June 21, 2012, online
ii Ibid.
Provenance
STANDARD (OSLO) Acquired from the above by the present owner