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Bergen Kunsthall Announces Tauba Auerbach Tetrachromat

Bergen Kunsthall presents Tauba Auerbach Tetrachromat on view 11 November–22 December 2011.

In Tauba Auerbach’s work traditional distinctions between image, dimension and content collapse. Surface, specifically the larger issues surrounding topology, has been a central concern in her recent paintings, drawings, photographs and artist books. Auerbach interweaves discordant positions such as disorder and order, readability and abstraction, permeability and solidity—phenomena that are usually viewed as incompatible—into unified surfaces and volumes.




Tauba Auerbach, installation view from The W Axis, STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo, Norway, 2010.

The title of the exhibition plays on the notion of ‘tetrachromatic’ vision. People normally perceive the world around them trichromatically (in three colours). Humans have three types of receptor for the perception of colour with varying sensitivities: red, green and blue. A new theory exists that there may be a small percentage of people (only women) who have a fourth colour receptor, which makes them ‘tetrachromatic.’ In order to play on such ideas of a fourth component, which, if it could be proven, would radically change our view of the world, Auerbach employs two analogies in this exhibition—the spatial (the idea of a fourth dimension) and the spectral (a fourth colour spectrum). 



Since 2009, Auerbach has created a body of work she calls “fold paintings”. Inasmuch as they obscure the boundaries between two- and three-dimensionality, these paintings can be understood as an analogy that raises the possibility of a concept of four dimensions. In these paintings she twists and folds the canvas, ironing or pressing it such that the folds are embedded in the material. Then the canvas is spread out and spray-painted while it still has its three-dimensional contour. The result—after the paint has dried and the canvas has been stretched—is an almost perfect registration of the previous three-dimensional form of the surface. The surface takes on a trompe l’oeil effect as a convincing reproduction of three-dimensional form on a surface, not unlike traditional mimetic painting—but in this case based on inventiveness rather than painterly virtuosity.



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; 2010 The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Exhibition Exhibition, Castello De Rivoli and “Younger Than Jesus,” New Museum, New York.

The exhibition has been initiated by Bergen Kunsthall and is a collaboration with Malmö Konsthall and WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels.

Bergen Kunsthall
Rasmus Meyers allé 5
5015 Bergen
Norway
+ 47 55 55 93 11
[email protected]
www.kunsthall.no

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