Contemporary Artist Tara Donovan’s Dazzling New Installation Opens at the Metropolitan Museum in November
Exhibition Dates: November 20, 2007 – April 27, 2008
Exhibition Location: Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, The Gioconda and Joseph King Gallery
Press Preview: Monday, November 19, 10:00 a.m. – noon
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A new, large-scale work conceived specifically for display in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s galleries by New York-based artist Tara Donovan (American, born 1969) will comprise the exhibition Tara Donovan at the Met, on view from November 20, 2007, through April 27, 2008.
The artist will use Mylar tape to create a wall-mounted installation that encompasses the entire 1,600-square-foot Gioconda and Joseph King Gallery on the mezzanine level of the Museum’s Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. Through a massive accumulation of metallic loops that both reflect and refract light, Donovan will transform the space into a unique phenomenological experience for the viewer.
In the construction of her installations, Tara Donovan employs systems that mimic the elemental patterns of growth found in the natural world. She works with a single, commonplace manufactured material — such as tape, Styrofoam cups, toothpicks, or drinking straws — and amasses up to millions of units into a structure that may resemble a topographical landscape, geological formation, or atmospheric condition. With roots in Earth Art, Process Art, Minimalism, and Post-Minimalism, Donovan’s work explores the inherent physical characteristics of the medium at hand while transcending the utilitarian nature of the materials.
Examples of previous works by the artist include a cloud-like hive of Styrofoam cups suspended from a ceiling; seemingly countless clear plastic buttons stacked into forms reminiscent of stalagmites; and a 44-foot-long wall of translucent plastic drinking straws. Through her labor-intensive process and meticulous craftsmanship, Donovan transforms materials from today’s consumer world into subtle and sublime abstract forms.
The work of Tara Donovan has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at galleries and museums nationwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2004), UCLA Hammer Museum (2004), and Hemicycle Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1999–2000). Her work was also featured in the 2000 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The artist was the 2005 recipient of the Alexander Calder Foundation’s first annual Calder Prize and has received many other awards and distinctions.
Tara Donovan at the Met is organized by Anne L. Strauss, Associate Curator in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. It is the fourth in the Met’s series of solo exhibitions of mid-career contemporary artists, which has featured Tony Oursler (2005), Kara Walker (2006), and Neo Rauch (2007).
The exhibition will also be featured on the Museum’s Web site, www.metmuseum.org.
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