PRESENTATION: Tara Donovan-Aggregations

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: Bruce Museum Archive

Tara Donovan in “Aggregations” reimagines and elevates everyday mass-manufactured materials into the realm of fine art. In her sculptures and large-scale installations, she employs a range of objects—disposable Styrofoam cups, index cards, paper plates, pencils, pins, rubber bands, straws, tar paper, and even toothpicks—transforming their physical properties and functions. While some of her works are inspired by abstraction and the pure geometry of the grid, others conjure up the sublime, evoking geological phenomena, biomorphic shapes, and organic, cellular forms. Monumental in scale, Tara Donovan’s “Aggregations” is composed of tens of thousands of acrylic rods meticulously joined together to form a composite sculpture. Here, the artist explores the additive effects of “accumulating identical objects,” or aggregations, in which she layers and combines materials together to complicate visual distinctions between part and whole. The final work inhabits the gallery with an almost animate presence, calling to mind a mineral or petrified plant. Known for her experimentation with materials and her rigorous, labor-intensive process, Donovan is something of an alchemist. She transforms the mundane and familiar into the strange and otherworldly, even as her works approximate things found in the natural world. Blurring the lines between art and science, this installation embodies Donovan’s restless creativity and ingenuity, and indeed the process of metamorphosis itself. 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 2005, Donovan joined Pace Gallery and presented a year later “Tara Donovan: New Work”, 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, Untitled, 2014, Acrylic and adhesive, © Tara Donovan, Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate, Courtesy of the Artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Bruce Museum, 1 Museum Drive, Greenwich, CT, USA, Duration: 12/5/2023-12/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 10:00-17:00, https://brucemuseum.org/