CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/16/2021

Highly anticipated 'Tauba Auerbach — S v Z' opens this week at SFMOMA!

"Untitled (Fold)" (2013) is reproduced from Tauba Auerbach — S v Z, the ever-more-intriguing catalog for the highly-anticipated survey opening at SFMOMA on Saturday, December 18. As in all things Tauba, this book is also an experiment, fitting neatly into the artist's practice as a book maker and inveterate question-asker. Beginning with the title—in which the "v" does not stand for "versus," but instead calls upon the mathematic symbol for "and/or"—and extending to the deeply satisfying custom-marbled black-and-white edges of the book block, this is a volume to be reckoned with slowly and with a very open mind. Created by the artist and David Reinfurt, who designed a new typeface based on Auerbach's iconic, back-slanting handwriting, it is filled with material, spatial and temporal ideas, structures, reflections, problems and solutions. For example, in the Folds, Auerbach attempts to conjure nothing less than four-dimensional space. "The Fold paintings are my effort to construct a portal through which to summon—or at least imagine—this inaccessible hyper-spatial territory," they are quoted. "My hope is that if these paintings can successfully efface the boundary between two-and three-dimensionality, then by analogy they imply the possibility of eroding the boundary between three-dimensional space and beyond. Even if it remains physically impossible to experience four-dimensional space, I believe we can use this 'logic' to approach or inhabit it in our minds."