Tauba Auerbach

Concrete verbs form the foundation of Tauba Auerbach’s latest show, “Float.” Possessed of the systematic logic of Sol LeWitt and the perceptual fetish of Bridget Riley, Auerbach effects permutations of quotidian actions—weaving, folding, bending, and cutting—to create objects that both resist and reinstate illusion.

For her series of “Weave” paintings (all works 2012), Auerbach deconstructs the canvas by literalizing its form. In the seven such works on view, taut strips of canvas traverse a wooden stretcher, proceeding along the frame’s prescribed verticals and horizontals to produce patterns at once legible and labyrinthine. Iterated themes, predicated on translations of basic geometries, dissolve into subtly different motifs without a clear point of inflection. In some, such as Slice, Bend, and Ray, transformations thread diagonally through the canvas in a discrete band; in others, such as Shift Wave, the entire surface undulates. As their intercalated layers alternately dilate and contract, Auerbach’s matrical compositions endow the grid—that quintessential signifier of flatness—with depth. This relief quality, coupled with the weave’s twofold directionality, recasts the canvas’s monochrome off-white as a flickering grayscale.

Auerbach’s deconstructive impulse extends to her sculpture Bent Onyx, here presented in an edition of two. Beginning with a block of the eponymous stone, the artist shaves a razor-thin slice, then scans and prints the original onto high-quality paper. The entire stone thus dissected, the pages are bound and their edges painted. Converting solid into surface and matter into digital reproduction, Bent Onyx achieves a trompe l’oeil effect: Stiff and hard-edged, its sheets of paper pass for slivers of stone. Yet, rather than the artist’s masterful hand, the printer’s mimetic skill maintains the ruse. The appeal of Bent Onyx, beyond its marbled luster, inheres in this confusion: our experience of seeing, but not quite being sure.