Tara Donovan

Screen Drawings (2020), a series of twenty-four monoprints included in Intermediaries, eight of which are featured here, is born out of Tara Donovan’s rigorous and methodical exploration of metal screen mesh, a material typically used for windows and doors that—like the straws, tubes, and sheets employed throughout the exhibition—offers a frame that filters and shapes vision and perception. On closer inspection, the mesh’s rigid crosshatch of steel wires is also notable in its grid-like nature, reflecting the artist’s ongoing engagement with the grid as both a framing device and a form to be leveraged and disrupted.

“The screens presented a way to use the grid as a readymade object that allowed me to experiment with the balance of positive and negative space on a two-dimensional plane in much the same way I was pursuing the sculptural works in the show.”

Tara Donovan, (opens in a new window) Whitewall

To make each unique image in the series, Donovan created a new pattern by manipulating the screen’s mechanical grid, then inking it and pressing it onto paper. Meticulously moving or removing sections of the warp and weft of the screen’s wires to draw the pattern, for Donovan—who often uses the constraints and parameters of her materials to her advantage—the drawings became “an exercise to see how many patterns I could pull from the material without it disintegrating and losing its integrity.” The resulting printed grid in each work reveals a pattern obscured and removed from the reference material of the screen and transformed with the artist’s methodical intervention.

“The process allows for the chance of transcendence, when the material becomes something else. I look to push into material, to find and stabilize that moment just as it sits on the border of collapse.”

Tara Donovan

Utilizing as much as disturbing the mathematical regularity of the grid, the resultant drawings attune the eye to subtle shifts in pattern, the ambiguity of figure-ground relations, and the instability of form. In contrast to an earlier generation of artists, such as Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt, who employed the grid to create systematic compositions and distance from the artist’s hand, Donovan’s post-minimalist approach inserts the organic into the mechanical, using the rigidity of the grid as a space of invention and discovery.

Many of the works take on a code-like quality of dots and dashes, calling to mind the weave of textiles and punch cards used in the Jacquard loom, as well as early visualizations of computer coding. The more complex the pattern, the more an optical playfulness emerges, as if movement on the surface of the print might be discerned through close looking.

A through-line in the exhibition is the underscoring of the structural and material openness of Donovan’s work, which is less to be looked at than looked through. As materials that filter the gaze, Donovan’s use of wire mesh screens in the making of these new works suggest that vision is a mediated phenomenon, even in the moment of creation. To “draw” these works, the artist had to look through and past the screen, translating their textile-like materiality into two-dimensional, graphic markings.

By mobilizing the grid, Donovan breaks through this paradigm in the search for new perceptual models and new intermediaries.

Screen Drawings

“The screens presented a way to use the grid as a readymade object that allowed me to experiment with the balance of positive and negative space on a two-dimensional plane in much the same way I was pursuing the sculptural works in the show.”

“The process allows for the chance of transcendence, when the material becomes something else. I look to push into material, to find and stabilize that moment just as it sits on the border of collapse.”

To inquire about works by Tara Donovan, please email inquiries@pacegallery.com.

Tara Donovan

Intermediaries