Tauba Auerbach
Tetrachromat
22 March–2 June 2013
Opening: Friday 22 March, 19h
Press preview: Wednesday 20 March, 11h
WIELS
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354
1190 Brussels, Belgium
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 11–18h;
Nocturne every 1st and 3rd Wednesday
of the month: 11–21h
T +32 (0)2 340 00 53
Tauba Auerbach is considered one of the most innovative painters of our time. Her work collapses traditional distinctions between image, dimensionality and content. Surface and the larger issues surrounding topology have been central concerns in her recent paintings, drawings, photographs and artist books.
The title of the exhibition refers to a theory that there may be a small percentage of people—for genetic reasons, only women—who have a fourth type of colour receptor on their retinas. Most humans are trichromats, with receptors sensitive to red, green and blue wavelengths of light which combine to create the visible spectrum. The tetrachromat would have an extra variable modulating every one of these colours, and would therefore see distinctions between colours that appear the same to the trichromat.
Although Auerbach draws much of her inspiration from mathematics and physics, her visual output intersects equally with the basic themes of art history. Her paintings raise fundamental issues in new ways, among them the depiction of three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface, and the relationship between abstraction and representation. Auerbach interweaves disorder and order, readability and abstraction, permeability and solidity—phenomena that are usually viewed as incompatible—into unified surfaces and volumes.
Tetrachromat presents works from the series “Fold” and “Weaves” (including five new pieces shown here for the first time), as well as a set of artist books. Taken together, the works propose a relationship between a sensitivity to a fourth colour range and the ability to experience a fourth spatial dimension.
The artist: Tauba Auerbach
Tauba Auerbach (b. 1981) lives and works in New York. Her recent solo exhibitions include The W Axis at Standard (Oslo); Here and Now/And Nowhere at Deitch Projects, New York; Passengers at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; and The Answer/Wasn’t Here at the Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco. Her work has been included in Greater New York, PS1 MoMA, New York; The Whitney Biennial 2010, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Exhibition Exhibition, Castello De Rivoli and The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York.
The catalogue: FOLDS
In connection with the exhibition Tetrachromat, Tauba Auerbach is publishing, for the first time, a book that presents her ongoing series of “Folds.” Transferred to the medium of the book, the paintings are presented in a new and unexpected way alongside mathematical diagrams and texts by Edwin Abbott Abbott, Emmanuelle Dauplay and Italo Calvino.
Exhibition curated by Solveig Øvstebø.
The exhibition is initiated by Bergen Kunsthall, in a collaboration with Malmö Kunsthall and WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels.
Complementary Programme:
23 March, 15h
Talk by Tauba Auerbach
On the occasion of PA/PER VIEW 2013 and in the frame of her exhibition Tetrachromat at WIELS, Tauba Auerbach will discuss the possibility of a fourth colour receptor and of a fourth (and more) spatial dimension. She will describe the processes used in making the works, and how they address topology and tetrachromacy.
Press contact
Micha Pycke, micha.pycke [at] wiels.org / T +32 (0)2 340 00 51 / M +32 (0)486 680 070
