PRESENTATION: Tara Donovan-Screen Drawings

By identifying and exploiting the usually overlooked physical properties of modest, mass-produced goods, Tara Donovan creates ethereal works that challenge our perceptual habits and preconceptions. The atmospheric effects of her art align her with Light and Space artists, such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell, while her commitment to a laborious and site-responsive methodology links her to Postminimalist and Process artists, especially Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

The presentation of screen drawings by Tara Donovan spotlights a new body of work made with aluminum insect screen. The works in the exhibition can be understood as an extension of Donovan’s gridded relief prints. The exhibition features 22 screen drawings of various scales, ranging from just over a foot in height and width to nearly four feet wide and tall. For these works, which Donovan began creating during the pandemic, the artist moves, pinches, and cuts the wires of the aluminum insect screen to extract shapeshifting, mesmeric patterns from the material’s existing grids. Donovan took a new approach to each featured screen drawing, using a mathematical methodology to explore the phenomenological possibilities of the material. These screen drawings reflect Donovan’s longstanding interest in human perception and her ability to transform everyday objects into talismanic, mutable works of art. The varied patterns in the artist’s screen drawings shift depending on the viewer’s position to them—these subtle changes lend the works a digital quality. Each screen drawing in the exhibition produces unique visual effects that conjure unexpected associations.

Soon after receiving an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999, Tara Donovan obtained her first major museum solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Hemicycle Gallery in Washington, D.C. A year later, she participated in the prestigious biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art. In the early 2000s, for her first major gallery exhibitions at Ace Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, Donovan mounted a series of site-responsive installations, which became representative of her practice. In celebrated works, most notably “Transplanted” (2001), “Nebulous” (2002), and “Haze” (2003), Donovan created sublime gradients of light, color, translucence, and texture using nothing but tar paper, Scotch tape, and drinking straws, respectively. Despite the artificiality of their materials, Donovan’s works often take on biomorphic qualities or evoke natural phenomena, from fog and rock formations to fungal blooms and stalagmites. Other works such as “Colony” (2000), which suggested urban sprawl, gestured to humankind’s mark on the world—the Anthropocene. After her exhibitions at Ace Gallery, Donovan devoted herself to a string of solo projects at distinguished museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2003), UCLA’s Hammer Museum (2004), the Berkeley Art Museum (2006), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2009) among others. For one such project, Tara Donovan at the Met (2007), she clustered loops of metallic Mylar tape into a scintillating web that proliferated across several walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Reworking the propositions of Minimalism, the artist staged a shifting phenomenological encounter that prompted visitors to circumambulate the space. Her first major survey exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened the subsequent year and was followed by other solo projects at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Parrish Museum. In recent years, Donovan has employed Slinkys, styrene cards, and pins to create framed, wall-hung works, whose tactile surfaces are animated by optical effects. Operating somewhere between drawing, painting, and relief sculpture, her two series Drawings (Pins) and Compositions (Cards) are abstract works in direct dialogue with her monumental sculptures constructed out of the same materials. They continue the artist’s rigorous process of experimentation with mundane objects while expanding the possibilities of sculpture in relation to bodies, space, and time.

Photo: Tara Donovan, Screen Drawing, 2021, aluminum insect screen, 21-1/2″ × 21-1/2″ × 1-1/4″ (54.6 cm × 54.6 cm × 3.2 cm) © Tara Donovan, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 68 Park Place, East Hampton, NY, USA, Duration: 9-19/6/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-17:00, Sun 12:00-16:00, www.pacegallery.com/