Tauba Auerbach is considered one of the most innovative painters of our time. Her work collapses traditional distinctions between image, dimensionality and content. Surface and the larger issues surrounding topology have been central concerns in her recent paintings, drawings, photographs and artist books.
The title of the exhibition refers to a theory that there may be a small percentage of people – for genetic reasons, only women – who have a fourth type of colour receptor on their retinas. Most humans are trichromats, with receptors sensitive to red, green and blue wavelengths of light which combine to create the spectrum of visible colours. The tetrachromat, supposedly equipped with an extra variable that modulates every one of these colors, would therefore see distinctions between colours that are invisible to the trichromat.
Although Auerbach draws much of her inspiration from mathematics and physics, her visual output intersects equally with the basic themes of art history. Her paintings raise fundamental issues in new ways, among them the depiction of three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface, and the relationship between abstraction and representation. Auerbach interweaves disorder and order, readability and abstraction, permeability and solidity – phenomena that are usually viewed as incompatible – into unified surfaces and volumes. Curator : Solveig Øvstebø. The exhibition has been initiated by Bergen Kunsthall, in collaboration with Malmö Kunsthall and WIELS.
Author Ingrid Melano
