Tauba Auerbach Extended Object, 2025
Acrylic on canvas in painted wood frame
45,7 x 61 x 10 cm
The Extended Object series captures the fleeting motion of liquid. These paintings extend Tauba Auerbach’s ongoing research into inventing tools and techniques that induce specific material behaviors. By pouring rhythmic droplets of pigment and manipulating the canvas below, the artist allows the paint to pool and shift, harnessing the flow of color to coax out delicate patterns. The paintings give form to a temporal process, the sequential deposit of dissolved pigment. But the gestures employed to rhythmically direct the placement of paint or to modify the expansion of the motifs remain hidden.
An at-length quote of Tauba on the series below:
My love for studying math and physics comes from a desire to point my attention (and a viewer’s attention) towards the fundamental magic that exists in the world — the fact that order spontaneously emerges from disorder, that vibration begets matter, that light travels at an absolute speed, that gravity bends space and time, that the turbulence in a fluid can have rhythm, that time exists and is mysteriously asymmetrical (at least in our experience of it) that molecular asymmetry (chirality) is somehow connected to the aliveness of a material.
Our human world is totally on fire, we are self-destructing as a species, but the universe is still utter magic and I’m in awe of it.
The flow of fluids has been of particular interest to me as a way to study form that arises from movement or behavior—something dynamic existing in time.
Using the studio as a laboratory, I’ve set out to induce flow patterns, to set up the conditions for coordinated behaviors in the liquid of the paint, and then get out of the way to allow them to happen with just enough freedom to really be their own doing, rather than mine. The “images” in the paintings are not on a background, but in or of the same field of the background— the surface is a continuous film of paint where everything is fully incorporated into the wet surface, merging with it entirely. The surfaces might still even look wet.
For me, the droplet is a particle. It’s a slice or a cross-section of a stream.
The title of the series draws an analogy between this and the notion of the "extended object” as articulated by string theory, which conceives of a particle as an expression of a vibrating string in higher dimensions. The relationship is between a point and a line (point extended, extruded or dragged through space.)
A clepsydra is device that uses water to keep time. These paintings try to capture and freeze a span of time through a sequence of coordinated droplets — constellations falling in rhythmic sequence, (or in one case— the blue, black, white painting— a group of nearly identical streams) and accumulating on their surfaces. I’ve tried to grasp something fleeting and ungraspable.
An at-length quote of Tauba on the series below:
My love for studying math and physics comes from a desire to point my attention (and a viewer’s attention) towards the fundamental magic that exists in the world — the fact that order spontaneously emerges from disorder, that vibration begets matter, that light travels at an absolute speed, that gravity bends space and time, that the turbulence in a fluid can have rhythm, that time exists and is mysteriously asymmetrical (at least in our experience of it) that molecular asymmetry (chirality) is somehow connected to the aliveness of a material.
Our human world is totally on fire, we are self-destructing as a species, but the universe is still utter magic and I’m in awe of it.
The flow of fluids has been of particular interest to me as a way to study form that arises from movement or behavior—something dynamic existing in time.
Using the studio as a laboratory, I’ve set out to induce flow patterns, to set up the conditions for coordinated behaviors in the liquid of the paint, and then get out of the way to allow them to happen with just enough freedom to really be their own doing, rather than mine. The “images” in the paintings are not on a background, but in or of the same field of the background— the surface is a continuous film of paint where everything is fully incorporated into the wet surface, merging with it entirely. The surfaces might still even look wet.
For me, the droplet is a particle. It’s a slice or a cross-section of a stream.
The title of the series draws an analogy between this and the notion of the "extended object” as articulated by string theory, which conceives of a particle as an expression of a vibrating string in higher dimensions. The relationship is between a point and a line (point extended, extruded or dragged through space.)
A clepsydra is device that uses water to keep time. These paintings try to capture and freeze a span of time through a sequence of coordinated droplets — constellations falling in rhythmic sequence, (or in one case— the blue, black, white painting— a group of nearly identical streams) and accumulating on their surfaces. I’ve tried to grasp something fleeting and ungraspable.