page_title: Tara Donovan
section_title: Exhibitions
hierarchical_section_title: Tara Donovan / Career / Exhibitions
caption_attribution_description: English: Tara Donovan's piece at Renwick Gallery
context_page_description: Tara Donovan is an American sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, and prints utilize everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Known for her commitment to process, she has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects. Her work has been conceptually linked to an art historical lineage that includes Postminimalism and Process artists such as Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris, along with Light and Space artists such as Mary Corse, Helen Pashgian, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell.
context_section_description: Donovan's first major commercial gallery exhibitions were mounted at Ace Gallery in New York and Los Angeles. Her work was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Earlier, from 1999 to 2000, Donovan exhibited Whorl at Hemicycle Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Upon receiving the call that she would be exhibiting this site-specific installation, Donovan is quoted as saying "I screamed and ran around in circles ... What do you think?" In a review of that exhibition, art critic Jessica Dawson observed that "Like Whorl, the artist's past works transformed outsize quantities of everyday materials—toothpicks, roofing felt, rolls of adding machine paper—into the unexpected: natural formations, seemingly living organisms, topographic maps." Following Whorl, Donovan showed a series of exhibitions at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. 
  In 2003, she occupied the entire Ace Gallery space at 274 Hudson Street in New York with a series of ‘site-responsive’ installations, many of which have now come to define the artist's oeuvre. Examples include Haze (2003), which is composed entirely of translucent plastic drinking straws stacked against a wall and buttressed by the adjoining walls to create a monumental frieze with atmospheric effects. The floor installation Nebulous (2002) is made entirely of Scotch tape that has been unspooled and extemporaneously ‘woven’ into interconnected units. Transplanted (2001) expanded upon her previous projects with torn pieces of tar paper in order to create a monumental slab of material occupying a footprint of over 25-feet square.  Strata (2000) is another expansive floor installation made of pooled and layered pieces of dried Elmer's glue. Moiré (1999) consists of large spools of adding machine paper that are manipulated and layered to form radiating patterns that shift with the position of the viewer. Colony (2000) is composed of cut pieces of standard pencils at various lengths, which are arranged on the floor to suggest the architectural sprawl of urban development. The exhibition received widespread critical acclaim, garnering reviews and profiles in The New York Times, Village Voice, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art International, and W Magazine, among others.
  A series of solo museum projects followed at venues such as Rice University Art Gallery in Houston, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, UCLA's Hammer Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, and the Saint Louis Art Museum, among others.
  Donovan says of her work, "It is not like I'm trying to simulate nature. It's more of a mimicking of the way of nature, the way things actually grow." Fellow artist Chuck Close told a reporter that ""At this particular moment in the art world, invention and personal vision have been demoted in favor of appropriation, of raiding the cultural icebox. For somebody to go out and try to make something that doesn't remind you of anybody else's work and is really, truly innovative—and I think Tara's work is—that's very much against the grain of the moment. To me, it represents a gutsy move."
caption: Untitled by Tara Donovan
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