NYAB Event - Tara Donovan Exhibition

Tara Donovan Exhibition

The Pace Gallery (32 E 57th St)

This event has ended.

Pace presents an exhibition of Tara Donovan’s newest pin drawings. A concurrent exhibition of her prints will be on view one floor above at Pace Prints from May 8 to June 27.

Donovan made her first pin drawings in 2009, continuing her practice of accumulating common objects into dense, visually rich compositions. Using thousands of nickel-plated steel pins—a material typically used by tailors—pressed into white gatorboard, she creates shimmering gradients through the clustering of pins and their interaction with light.

The works negotiate a space between sculpture and drawing, using three-dimensional objects to create what, at certain distances, seems to be a two-dimensional field. The pin drawings rely on perceptual shifts that occur when viewing the work from different vantage points. A close-up view highlights each individual pin, while a distanced view generates a phenomenological experience, wherein light and banal materials coalesce into luminescent compositions.

Donovan expands upon her previous series of pin drawings by inscribing an underlying geometry into the structure of the drawings, which reveals itself through a multi-perspectival observation. When viewed from the side, we see the length between the pinhead and gatorboard, which generates a new experience of the field of pins. Donovan likens this side view to the experience of seeing trees in a forest, where clusters of linear forms condense, layering atop one another and creating a secondary composition.

To accompany the exhibition, Pace will publish a catalogue featuring essays by Paul Brewer, director of Donovan’s archive project, and art historian Jonathan T.D. Neil.

Following this exhibition, Donovan will unveil a new installation at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY, as part of its Platform series. On view from July 4 to October 18, 2015, her site-specific installation will respond to the architecture of the Herzog & de Meuron building. In August, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, will present three installations by Donovan, including her monumental 2011 work Untitled (Mylar).

Tara Donovan (b. 1969, Flushing, NY) received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, and her MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the inaugural Calder Prize in 2005 and a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award in 2008. In 2014 Pace presented a survey of Donovan’s work at its pop-up gallery in Menlo Park, CA.

Donovan has been the subject of numerous one-artist exhibitions at institutions worldwide including the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2004–05); University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2006–07); St. Louis Art Museum (2006); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2007); The Indianapolis Museum of Art (2010); Milwaukee Art Museum (2012); and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2014). In 2008 The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, published her first monograph with Monacelli Press, coinciding with its presentation of her traveling solo exhibition.

Her work is included in numerous public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Tara Donovan lives in Brooklyn, NY, and works in Long Island City, NY.

This is her eighth exhibition at Pace.

Media

• Drawing

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