NYAB Event - Tara Donovan Exhibition

Tara Donovan Exhibition

The Pace Gallery (534 W 25th St)

This event has ended.

In this exhibition, Donovan presents two new large scale sculptures. With these works, the artist continues to explore the phenomenological effect of work created through the accumulation of identical objects. Untitled (index cards), the first such work created by Donovan, is a 13’ x 25’ x 30’ sculpture in eight parts comprised of several million 3x5” white cards stacked and glued into scores of interweaving columnar forms combining to reach a summit on each element.

Pace’s exhibition will also feature a newly completed untitled sculpture made with thousands of acrylic rods, a technique the artist developed in 2010. Similar acrylic works were recently exhibited in Donovan’s international retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and Arp Museum Bahnhof in Germany. This will be the first such work shown at the gallery. Comprised of tens of thousands of clear plastic rods of varying length, the works are formed from roughly spherical units of radiating rods. These elements intermingle, entangling the arrays and seemingly distorting the forms while accelerating the directionality of the rods like visible lines of force.

As in all of her work, Donovan spends months or even years searching for a method of assembly that allows the simple and immutable characteristics of the chosen material to generate complex, emergent phenomena which keep the viewer cycling between perception of the parts and the whole between the forms themselves and the light that surrounds and divides them. The work draws on both Minimalist and formalist histories, while creating a radically new form which embraces complexity and iterative processing.

For the last 20 years, Tara Donovan has used simple, mass produced materials and objects to explore the transformative effect of the accumulation and aggregation. The result has been a body of work known for its otherworldly environments, hazy topographies and organic structures. This is the first of two Tara Donovan exhibitions at Pace this spring. From May 22 to June 30, Pace Menlo Park will present Tara Donovan: Untitled featuring a selection of seminal works by the artist completed over the past 15 years.

Tara Donovan (b. 1969, Flushing, New York) received a B.F.A. from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C. (1991) and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (1999). Donovan received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award in 2008. Other awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Willard L. Metcalf Award, New York; the National Academy Museum, Helen Foster Barnett Prize, New York; the Women’s Caucus for Art, Presidential Award, New York (all in 2004), and the first annual Calder Prize, which was granted by the Calder Foundation in 2005. She was an Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial Sculpture Fellow, Cornish, New Hampshire (2003) and received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2003); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2003); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation (1999). Donovan’s work was also selected for the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.