ART CITIES: N.York-Tara Donovan

For over twenty years, Tara Donovan has created large-scale installations, sculptures and drawings that utilize everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Known for her commitment to process, she has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

Tara Donovan on her solo exhibition “Stratagems”, presents a group of sculptures made entirely of found, scavenged, and upcycled CD-ROM discs, the exhibition will be complemented by a Pace Live performance from choreographer Kim Brandt. Known for her process- and system-based work across sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking, Donovan often explores the talismanic qualities of everyday materials and objects, from buttons, Styrofoam cups, pencils, and pins to readymade screens and Slinky toys. Drawing on the formal language of Minimalism and Postminimalism, Donovan’s works both use and mis-use such nontraditional materials, transforming them into visually dazzling compositions without obliterating their fundamental essences or histories as objects from everyday life. Through acts of accumulation, aggregation, and iteration, she transmutes her materials into shapeshifting works of art, which explore the possibilities—and limits—of human perception. The exhibition is the first exhibition dedicated to Donovan’s three- dimensional sculptures mounted in New York since 2021. Comprising 11 new sculptures built atop concrete pedestals, each of Donovan’s vertically-oriented sculptures is composed of stacks of CDs, varying in height from seven to ten feet tall. Breathing new life into the banal and outmoded medium of the compact disc, these works will be activated by the natural light that floods the gallery space. Depending on the time of day and the viewer’s perspective, a range of optical effects unfold across the refractive surfaces of the works. Mutable and seemingly alive, Donovan’s latest sculptures respond directly to the presence of the viewer’s body as it traverses space, reflecting her deep interest in the relationship between perceptual nuances and material transfigurations. At the same time, these works invite the viewer to contemplate the transformation of an obsolete medium—once used for the storage and transmission of digital information—into a prism for embodied experience. During Frieze week in New York, choreographer Kim Brandt will stage a performance with six dancers amid Donovan’s exhibition. Brandt’s performance will share certain affinities with Donovan’s work and riff on the sculptures in the show, developing through an accumulation of scores that invites dancers to explore spiraling as generative movement.

Known for her commitment to process, Tara Donovan has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects. By identifying and exploiting the usually overlooked physical properties of modest, mass-produced goods, 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. Soon after receiving an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999, she 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. 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 2005, Donovan joined Pace Gallery and presented in 2016 her first major solo exhibition with the gallery. For this show, she produced “Untitled (Plastic Cups)”, a large-scale installation that stacked plastic cups until these formed an unworldly topography reminiscent of ocean waves or rolling hills. She now debuts most of her new projects in solo and group exhibitions at Pace and its several global locations in London, Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Palo Alto. 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, Stratagem XII (detail), 2024, CDs, 81″ × 24″ × 24″ (205.7 cm × 61 cm × 61 cm), Tara Donovan, Courtesy the artist and Pace Galley

Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 3/5-15/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/