Tauba Auerbach, whose work was recently seen in the exhibition Feverish Library at Petzel Gallery in Chelsea, also in last year’s Whitney Biennale, is an artist who turns commonplace items inside out through her mathematical analyses.

On receiving Harper Levine’s announcement this week about one in Auerbach’s series of objects as books, Marble, I looked around for more information on her work and process. The following, from arrestedmotion.com, describes her approach:

A Book Is Not An X continues Auerbach’s insatiable appetite for the methodical and mathematical. Through a series of six “books”, essentially sculptures that deconstruct and recontectualize the book as it’s conventional perceived into a wholly unique aesthetic form (in a similar, yet highly more complex, sense to her recent pop-up book), Auerbach takes aim at one of her favorite muses, ‘topology’.

Described as “a branch of mathematics that inquires into the basic characteristics of surfaces and objects in order to understand the range of incarnations the form can take while still retaining its defining properties”, the multi-talented artist’s fascination with that point at which order breaks down into chaos, and the beauty and energy of the tension therein, will be on full display. Each work, produced in editions of ten (or fewer), combines hand painted elements, photo-based printing and three dimensional volumes into a majestic, yet minimalistic union of language and art.

One piece, entitled Fractile, begins as a single sheet of paper that blossoms into 11 pages, which becomes 121 pages, which in turn generates 1331 pages into a massive (16″ x 23.25″ x 11.75″) oragami-esque winged creature. Additionally, two works, Marble and Wood, appear as a blocks of their particular substrates when closed, yet can be opened and flipped through page by page to reveal their hidden textures and depth. These two works were tediously constructed, with Tauba either sanding (wood) or carving (marble) a sheet the thickness of a piece of paper from the object, scanning the remaining block, and then continuing to sand and carve. Perhaps most compelling with these works was that in order to create the piece, she had to destroy the original blocks, thereby memorializing them in a fully realized simulated aesthetic object, which ultimately looks optically indistinguishable from the original.

Tauba Auerbach with elements from [2,3] at the 2010 NY Art Book Fair. Photo courtesy NY Art Book Fair.

About his copy of Marble, Harper Levine writes:
Quite simply one of the greatest artist's books in the history of the medium, where Tauba Auerbach takes a slab of real marble, deconstructs it, and then re-imagines it in book form, with the book being virtually indistinguishable from the original object. The equivalent in book arts of Ferran Adriá's achievements in molecular gastronomy.

Marble consists of 55 digital offset printed pages on Mohawk superfine paper, with the spine and edges hand-painted by Tauba Auerbach and Leah Hughes. Stone working by Tauba Auerbach and Chelsea Deklotz, created on an oscillating flat lap over a period of two and a half months, with the resulting thin slices of marble digitally scanned to produce the pages of the book. Retouching by Chelsea Deklotz. Printing by Indigo Press. Binding co-designed by Daniel E. Kelm and Tauba Auerbach. Binding construction by Daniel E. Kelm and Leah Hughes at the Wide Awake Garage. A fine copy. One of the most impressive objects I have handled in my 15 years of rare book dealing. Harper’s Books.

You can see the incredible engineering that makes Auerbach’s art come alive in a video on her piece titled [2,3] at SCAD’s ACA Artist’s Book Collection.

At MoMA, you can see pages from RGB Colorspace Atlas (2011), a three-volume digitally printed set that depicts every variation of RGB color possible.

Work by Auerbach is included in the exhibition Lifelike, at the New Orleans Museum of Art, continuing through January 27. Organized by the Walker Art Center, Lifelike invites a close examination of artworks based on commonplace objects and situations, which are startlingly realistic, often playful, and sometimes surreal.
The exhibition will then be on view February 24-May 26 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA.
Tauba Auerbach is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery.