Tara Donovan

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 sit—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.