Pace

Tara Donovan

10 May - 28 Jun 2014

Installation view
TARA DONOVAN
10 May – 28 June 2014

New York—Pace Gallery is pleased to present new work by Tara Donovan on view from May 10 to June 28, 2014 at 534 West 25th Street. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, May 10 from 6 to 8 p.m.

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.

Donovan has been the subject of solo exhibitions and installations at numerous museums. Among them: Tara Donovan, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark and Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, Germany (2013-2014); Currents 35: Tara Donovan, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin (2012); Tara Donovan: Untitled, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, (2010); Tara Donovan, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, (2008–2009) which traveled to: Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Tara Donovan at the Met, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York was on view from 2008-2009.

Concurrent with the ICA, Boston survey, the artist’s first monograph, with an interview by Lawrence Weschler, was published by the Monacelli Press.

Tara Donovan’s work is held in numerous important private and public collections, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; St. Louis Art Museum; Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Tara Donovan lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
 

Tags: Tara Donovan, Joan Mitchell