The Multidisciplinary Practice of Tauba Auerbach

Tauba Auerbach is a visual artist based in New York, working across a diverse range of disciplines including painting, sculpture, weaving, and artists' books. Born in 1981, they grew up in San Francisco, California, the child of theater designers. Before establishing their career in fine arts, they apprenticed and worked as sign painters at New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco from 2002 to 2005. Their practice is characterized by an engagement with various media, from photography and musical performance to book design.

Auerbach's work explores the limits of linguistic, mathematical, and spatial systems of logic. Their diverse body of work includes:

• Text and language-based work: Drawings exploring linguistic systems such as Morse code, semaphore signals, calligraphy, the Ugaritic alphabet, and Alexander Melville Bell's visible speech.
• Fold paintings: A series of works that gained acclaim and were included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1's Greater New York.
• Weave paintings: Intricate, architectural compositions made of woven canvas strips.
• Grain paintings: Gestural paintings created using custom tools made by the artist.
• Glass sculpture: Works crafted after a residency at Urban Glass in Brooklyn, New York.
• Auerglass: A two-person tracker action pump organ conceived with Cameron Mesirow.
• Extended object paintings: Small paintings created using an apparatus for the coordinated deposit of paint in deliberate arrays of droplets.

Exhibitions and Publications

Auerbach has held numerous solo exhibitions in cities such as San Francisco, New York, Oslo, Bergen, Malmo, Brussels, London, Rome, Vienna, and Cleveland. Their work has also been featured in significant group exhibitions, including the 2010 Whitney Biennial and the 2012 MoMA exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language.

In 2013, Auerbach founded Diagonal Press, a publisher of books, type specimens, and other items. Their published works include various monographs and editions, such as How To Spell the Alphabet, Chaos, and Folds.