Tara Donovan

On View
May 17 – Jul 3, 2025
Tokyo

Pace is pleased to present a focused survey of Tara Donovan’s work from the last 20 years at its Tokyo gallery. On view from May 17 to July 3, this presentation—marking the American artist’s first solo exhibition in Tokyo—will bring together sculptures and installations she created between 2003 and 2024.

Known for her process- and system-based work across multiple mediums and dimensions, Donovan began her career in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Drawing on the formal languages of the California Light and Space movement, Minimalism, and Postminimalism, she deftly manipulates and transforms everyday materials and objects—from buttons, plastic straws, Styrofoam cups, pencils, CD-ROM discs, and pins to readymade screens and Slinky toys—into shapeshifting sculptures, installations, drawings, and prints that explore the possibilities and limits of human perception. Her phenomenological works both use and misuse nontraditional materials, turning them into visually dazzling compositions without obliterating their fundamental essences or histories as objects from daily life.

Donovan recently presented the solo exhibition Tara Donovan: Aggregations at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, and her work can be found in the collections of many institutions around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Kunsthalle Praha in Czechia, among others. She was awarded the first annual Calder Prize in 2005, and she received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2008.

The artist’s exhibition in Tokyo—her twelfth solo show with Pace, which has represented her since 2005—will shed light on the evolution of her practice over the last two decades, highlighting her immense technical skill and her enduring interest in enactments of accumulation, aggregation, and iteration. The earliest works in the presentation include Haze (2003), a site—responsive sculpture made of translucent drinking straws, and a 2004 cube sculpture composed entirely of straight pins held together by friction and gravity alone—this series is now represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. A 2011 sculpture created with Mylar and hot glue, measuring some four feet tall, speaks to Donovan’s explorations of organic, undulating forms in addition to geometric ones.

More recent is a 2024 wall sculpture made of cut and reconfigured Slinky toys and a 2025 pin drawing specially created for this show. Stratagem IX (2024), another sculpture in the exhibition, features a vertically oriented structure of found, scavenged, and upcycled CD-ROM discs atop a concrete pedestal. Measuring eight-and-a-half feet tall, this work breathes new life into the banal and outmoded medium of the compact disc. Depending on the time of day and the viewer’s perspective, a range of optical effects unfold across the refractive surface of the sculpture. Mutable and seemingly alive, Stratagem IX responds directly to the presence of the viewer’s body as it traverses space. Together, all the works in Donovan’s Tokyo exhibition showcase her ability to find patterns and order in unlikely materials—and to use those materials as prisms for embodied experiences.

This year, a sculpture by Donovan figures in the group exhibition Postcards from the Heart: Selections from the Brigitte and Henning Freybe Collection at the Vancouver Art Gallery, on view from April 18 to October 5. In 2026, her work will be presented in dialogue with Alexander Calder as part of a major two-artist exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum.

When I start working with a new material, I like to isolate it so I can see where it will lead me: it is the material itself and the investigations along the way that guide the construction process.

Tara Donovan, (opens in a new window) Apollo

About the Artist

For over twenty years, Tara Donovan has created large-scale installations, sculptures, and drawings that 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.

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EXHIBITION DETAILS

Tara Donovan
May 17 – Jul 3, 2025

GALLERY

1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A
5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku
Tokyo

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Journal

65 Years at Pace: Archival Titles and Posters

Tara Donovan and Kim Brandt: Sculpture, Movement, and Perception

Tara Donovan at the Bruce Museum

Pace Artists Reflect on Mark Rothko