Tauba Auerbach - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, November 16, 2022 | Phillips

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale,...

New York Auction 16 November 2022

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  • Coming to auction in the heels of Tauba Auerbach’s first museum survey held at the San Francisco Museum of Art earlier this year, Grain: Maille Stroke I (For L) is exemplary of the way in which the artist probes the boundaries of spatial and visual perception through the language of abstraction. Executed in 2015, it is among the first paintings in Auerbach’s ongoing Grain series, of which examples reside in collections such as The Broad, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In Auerbach’s Grain paintings, form and color fuse to form intricate patterns that vibrate across the vast panels. The works are a result of a highly intricate process that is evocative of Gerhard Richter’s squeegee method, whereby Auerbach drags layers of paint across the surface with a custom-made instrument.

     

    Caroline A. Jones on Tauba Auerbach’s Grain Series 

     

    The following is an excerpt from Caroline. A Jones’ “Tauba Medium”, published in ArtForum in November 2021. Jones is a professor of art history in the Architecture Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, and director of MIT’s Transmedia Storytelling Initiative.

     

    “The first step in making the “Grain” paintings involves preparing a richly monochromatic ground, which is allowed to dry, and onto which the artist layers further discrete films of contrasting color—all while the canvas is horizontal. Before that prepared field of action can fully “cure,” Auerbach moves the canvas into a vertical position and pushes into the layers of hardening pigment with handmade tools based on the kinds of “graining devices” used to create trompe l’oeil wood grain. (The artist learned about such tools during their postcollege years in San Francisco while working at the city’s proudly artisanal New Bohemia Signs.) Auerbach describes their gestures as both “rotational and translational,” with movements made “in the form of the helix.” Whether such a geometric figure is only an inspiration or describes the actual path traced by a complex coordination of shoulder, elbow, and wrist via muscle tendons is hard to say. Auerbach accompanies the helical motion with an intuitive “rocking” and “tremor,” as they scrape, rotate, and slide the cylindrical graining device into and across the now-vertical field of pigment. These actions culminate in a final move that smoothly shifts the painting back into a horizontal orientation. Has the paint sagged? In the case of the overarching gesture that is filled with the Sierpiński fractal forms—now revealed, by way of the graining tool, as an indexical substrate of contrasting color—the subtracted imprint does acknowledge the force of gravity, which has performed its own action on the material before it can come to rest and dry. The resulting shapes and edges are both flaccid and precise, the colors subtle and sumptuous—orange and black in a field of buff in the Sierpiński piece, or, in another “Grain” work, a screaming persimmon, edged in blue, in a sea of cream. As in most Auerbach paintings, we sense a mysterious collaboration between physical matter, planetary forces, and human intervention, but we must invest time to discern the actions involved. As with a Gerhard Richter or a Katharina Grosse, pondering what had to have happened is one of the pleasures of receiving the work.”

     

    The full article can be found here.

    • Provenance

      Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

339

Tauba Auerbach

Grain - Maille Stroke I (For L)

signed and dated "TAUBA AUERBACH 2015" on the reverse
acrylic on masonite with Baltic Birch cradle
90 x 48 in. (228.6 x 121.9 cm)
Executed in 2015.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000 

Sold for $226,800

Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Day Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 16 November 2022