LOUISIANA CONTEMPORARY: Tara Donovan

February 8 - July 28 2013

Renowned American artist Tara Donovan creates sculptural objects of enigmatic beauty by utilizing and experimenting with simple, everyday objects like foil, toothpicks, straws and buttons.

“Beauty is inherent in the material itself, form follows” says Donovan. 

Tara Donovan’s works are built up in the exhibit venue or carefully adapted and matched to the spaces in which they take form. They challenge our conventional ideas of proportion and our experience and interpretation of the things we sense and navigate amongst. In an interview in the latest issue of Louisiana Magasin, no. 37, Tara Donovan says: "I am striving to be an alchemist and to transcend the material". She experiments with materials and with the human sensory system.

This exhibition marks Donovan's first showing in Europe and presents eight of her works from the years 2004-2012, installed in the Column Hall and the Large Hall on the bottom floor of the East Wing of the museum. Sculpturally, they range from small crystalline growths to large organic landscapes with natural forms as a central reference point. Although organic, often nature-like formal idiom seems to be present, the works are always open to interpretation. Donovan is keenly aware that she is not simulating nature. It is rather an imitation of nature’s growth principles that holds her interest.

Tara Donovan (1969) lives in New York and has already made her mark on the art scene, most recently with a solo exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Centre Pompidou in Paris has a work by her in its collection which appeared in the exhibition "Elles" showing works by the museum’s female artists.

The exhibition is part of the exhibition series LOUISIANA CONTEMPORARY.

The exhibition at Louisiana has been created in collaboration with the Arp Museum, Bahnhof Rolandseck.