[2,3]

[2,3] – for 2 and 3D – is the title of the book by the artist Tauba Auerbach that will enter the collection in 2021 and that the Frac Bretagne will display for the first time in Rennes, from 21 January to 15 May 2022.

In this boxed set of artist’s books, six slim hardcover volumes open onto gigantic shapes inspired by complex geometric figures: pyramid, sphere, ziggurat, octagonal bipyramid (diamond), Möbius strip, etc. Reminiscent of children’s pop-up books, they are revealed in a palette of luminous and contrasting colours which recall the artist’s work.

[2,3] is the universal mathematical symbol for the closed interval between the integers two and three. For Tauba Auerbach, it marks the interstice in which she operates to animate 2D into 3D, allowing the cut-out shapes of the flattened and folded paper to be majestically transformed into expanded sculptures. The apparent fragility of the process starts a dialogue with the manifest qualities of stability and sturdiness traditionally associated with sculpture, to achieve a subtle union of emptiness and fullness.

This development of forms in space constitutes an important stage in the evolution of the artist’s work at the beginning of the 2010s. Until then restricted to optical effects on the flatness of the canvas (shadow plays replicating volume), her works open up to the third dimension and explore in a more comprehensive way this marked interest in the perception and animation of the surface.

THE ARTIST

Tauba Auerbarch (1981, USA)

The multidisciplinary artist Tauba Auerbach concentrates in her artistic practice the legacy of a visual arts education, a formative experience as a lettering artist and an inexhaustible interest in scientific phenomena.

Although Tauba Auerbach’s inspiration comes mainly from mathematics and physics, her visual investigations, which combine painting, drawing, photography and publishing, also refer to the great themes of art history. Her work interrogates in an unprecedented way certain fundamental themes, amongst which the representation of a three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface, the relationship between abstraction and representation, as well as chromatic perception and the issue of the fourth colour beyond the red-green-blue spectrum (RGB).

Through numerous collaborations with musicians, scientists, engineers and new technology companies, she develops her artistic research by trying to make complex notions perceptible through diverted means and unexpected diagonals. https://www.fracbretagne.fr/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Pilote-numero3-printemps2022-2-3-1.pdf

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Image: Tauba Auerbach, [2,3], 2011, (détail). Collection Frac Bretagne © Tauba Auerbach. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Crédit photographique : Steven Probert