Tauba Auerbach valuation
Folds a canvas, sprays it flat, and leaves you looking at a crease that is no longer there.
Tauba Auerbach was born in San Francisco in 1981 and worked as a sign painter in their early twenties, which shows in an interest in letterforms, systems and the mechanics of how a flat surface can be made to lie.
What a work by Tauba Auerbach is worth
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Bio
Tauba Auerbach was born in San Francisco in 1981 and worked as a sign painter in their early twenties, which shows in an interest in letterforms, systems and the mechanics of how a flat surface can be made to lie. The Fold paintings, begun around 2009, are the best-known body of work: the canvas is creased, sprayed while crumpled, then stretched flat again, so the shadow of a fold survives on a surface that is demonstrably smooth. The Weave paintings take the same argument into interlaced canvas. Auerbach also runs Diagonal Press, publishes artist's books, and made [2,3], a pop-up book of paper structures.
The paintings are unique and are what the market principally trades. The publishing is the complication: Diagonal Press editions are deliberately unlimited, unnumbered and unsigned, a stated position against manufactured scarcity, which means the usual questions a valuation asks — how many, which number, is it signed — have no answer here and should not be forced onto them. Books, posters and multiples from that press are valued as what they are. For the paintings, provenance and exhibition history do most of the work, along with the condition of a surface that cannot be cleaned conventionally.
New Bohemia Signs, the Whitney and the Auerglass
Auerbach grew up in San Francisco, the child of theatre designers, and worked at New Bohemia Signs there from 2002 to 2005. Their first solo exhibition was of text-based drawings exploring writing systems from semaphore and Morse code to the Ugaritic alphabet. The Fold paintings were first shown in 2009, and in 2010 Auerbach was in the Whitney Biennial and in Greater New York at MoMA PS1.
The Weave paintings were first shown in the exhibition Tetrachromat. A residency at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn in 2015 led to the glass sculpture of Projective Instrument, and with the musician Cameron Mesirow they conceived the Auerglass, a pump organ that needs two players. A painting's title, date and gallery provenance are what identify it.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
