Tauba Auerbach
Tauba Auerbach works in multiple media and formats, curious about structure and connectivity on the microscopic to the cosmic scale. Building on crafts in many disciplines, they often invent tools and techniques to induce or exaggerate material behaviors. Their work moves freely between painting, weaving, glass, photography, video, calligraphy and musical instrument design.
Tauba's work forages for information about the universe embedded in form and movement. Work springs from observations about how soap bubbles naturally organize themselves into foam, how liquids flow, or how sand changes state with heat. So-called “laws of nature” are deployed and exploited to coax out patterns and their dissolution. Making objects and images is both the result of, and part of research.
The idiosyncrasies and imperfections of gesture are both allowed and explored. The artist’s drawings merge disciplined repetition with improvisation and looseness. Various atypical painting processes balance choreography and chance.
Alongside making exhibitions and outdoor work, in 2013 Tauba started the imprint Diagonal Press as a holder for their ongoing typography and book-making practice.
Their first exhibition with Esther Schipper will take place in September 2025 on occasion of Berlin Art Week.
Tauba Auerbach was born 1981, in San Francisco, California. They studied Visual Arts at Stanford University, California. The artist lives and works in New York.
In 2008, Auerbach received the Eureka Fellowship at the Fleischhacker Foundation, and in the same year won the SECA Art Awards at SFMOMA. In 2011, they became an Artists Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. In 2016, they won the Queen Sonja Print Award. In 2024 Auerbach was commissioned to present a permanent installation, Foam, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s Art Park in Guarene.
Auerbach’s solo exhibitions include: Tide, Fridericianum, Kassel (2023); S v Z, SFMoMA, San Francisco (2021); Tauba Auerbach: Current, The Artist’s Institute at Hunter College, New York (2019); Flow Separation, Public Art Fund, New York Harbor, New York (2018); OOOoooOOO. 19 flags for 019, 019, Ghent (2018); INDUCTION: Tauba Auerbach + Elaine Radigue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (two-person exhibition, 2018); Diagonal Press, Stevenson Library, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2017); The New Ambidextrous Universe, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2014); Tetrachomat, Bergen Kunsthall, traveled to Malmö Konsthall, Wiels Contemporary Art Center (2011); A Book is Not An X, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, East Hampton (2011); Quarry, Whitney Museum Construction Site Installation, New York (2010); New Year, Western Bridge, Seattle (2010); Here and Now/And Nowhere, Deitch Projects, New York (2009); Passengers, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2008); All Time, All the Time, San Francisco Art Commission, San Francisco (2005).
Selected group exhibitions include: 360˚: why we paint?, WHY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou (2025); House in Motion/New Perspectives, de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2023); Reaching for the Stars. Works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2023); No Forms, curated by Margot Noron, Hill Art Foundation, New York (2022); BIBLIOGRAPHIC OFFICE: Fore-edge Painting, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO), Rome (2021); Neutral Background, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2021); My C Art Ography. The Erling Kagge Collection, Fundación Banco Santander, Madrid (2020); Figures on a Ground: Perspectives on Minimal Art, CAB Foundation, Brussels (2020); New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); MEDUSA: Bijoux et tabous, Museé d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2017); Oracle, The Broad, Los Angeles, CA (2017); A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2016); NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2016); TELE - Gen, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn (2015); Ecstatic Alphabets, MoMA, NY (2012); Lifelike, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012); Words Fail Me, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2007); and Panic Room, Deste Foundation, Athens (2006).