NEW YORK, NY.- Pace is presenting an exhibition of new and recent work by Tara Donovan at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. On view from January 13 to February 25, the show brings together a selection of screen drawings made with aluminum insect screen. For these works, which Donovan began creating during the pandemic, she moves, pinches, and cuts the wires of aluminum screen to extract mesmeric patterns from the material’s existing grids. Ranging from just over a foot in height and width to nearly four feet wide and tall, these two-dimensional screen drawings feature unique geometric motifs that produce varied visual effects.
Donovan’s screen drawings reflect her longstanding investigations into the possibilities—and limits—of human perception. The artist’s practice, which spans sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking, centers on transformations of familiar, everyday objects into talismanic, shapeshifting works of art that fully reveal themselves to viewers during in-person encounters. Requiring sustained contemplation on the part of the viewer, Donovan’s screen drawings change when experienced from different vantage points. With this body of work, the artist brings viewers into a suspended, meditative state, encouraging them to look closely to delve into the screens’ subtleties, nuances, and multitudes.
In creating her screen drawings, Donovan uses a mathematical methodology to draw out the phenomenological and illusionistic properties of the material. While some patterns seem to be rendered in relief, others appear to emerge from the depths of the grids. The intricate, layered appearances of Donovan’s patterns belie the artist’s use of one singular piece of screen for each of these works. Interstitial spaces between the lines in her compositions buzz with energy and activity, and all the screen drawings in the artist’s forthcoming exhibition are united by a sense of constant motion. Many also possess a distinctly digital quality that contributes to their aliveness.
This body of work can be understood as an extension of Donovan’s gridded relief prints, which she showed in her solo exhibition with Pace in New York in 2021. Donovan’s screen drawings indulge in the variable possibilities that exist within a defined system. In her work across mediums, the artist obscures and breaks down her chosen material—from readymade screens to paper plates and buttons—without obliterating its fundamental essence.
“I’ve always been interested in exploring the moment where the conditional relationship of part to whole breaks down,” Donovan has said of her process. “When investigating materials, I am always looking for certain physical traits that can somehow be activated outside the material or object itself.”
Tara Donovan (b. 1969, New York) has produced a body of work that transforms banal, everyday objects into extraordinary sculptures. In dialogue with a modernist history of using nontraditional and industrial materials, Donovan employs a Minimalist vocabulary, in which repetition and spatial relationships are integral. Dematerialization and process are central to Donovan’s practice, which straddles Minimalism and Maximalism, wherein ephemera becomes aesthetic and the developed gestures of traditional sculpture are replaced by an expression of fragmentation, fragility, and plurality. The artist is attracted to the aesthetic possibilities of her materials before she knows how she might employ them, generally gravitating toward simple things—pencils, plastic cups, pins, buttons— precisely because of their simplicity and accessibility. Donovan’s visually captivating transformations of nontraditional synthetic materials extend from the practice of Postminimalist sculptor Eva Hesse, and others. The notion of transcendence is an important aspect of Donovan’s oeuvre, observing the change in perception that occurs when a singular element is transformed into a larger object through the process of accumulation.
