Tauba Auerbach
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 before art school, 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. She 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.
If you own a work by Tauba Auerbach
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.