Tauba Auerbach and Hiro Kone

Born in San Francisco in 1981, Tauba Auerbach earned a BA in visual art from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, in 2003. Auerbach engages a range of mediums, among them painting, sculpture, photography, books, and jewelry, to address the nature of color, language, logic, and dimensionality. A former sign painter, Auerbach adapted in her early works elements of typography and calligraphy to form abstract compositions derived from the interior shapes of letters.

Auerbach’s work in abstraction probes the boundaries of visual and spatial perception. It navigates the murky depths where logical constructions, like visual patterns or mathematical equations, are pushed until they meet their comprehensible limits. Her series of Crumple paintings (2008) resembles oversized photocopies of crumpled paper. At normal viewing distance, these works are inscrutable as their dimensionality and legibility only materializes when viewed from afar. Her acclaimed series of Fold paintings, a body of work begun in 2009, was created by spray-painting the contours of crumpled swaths of canvas and then stretching the results, producing a convincing two-dimensional image that collapses pictorial space within the canvas. Auerbach’s Weave series (2012– ), an ongoing body of work consisting of woven canvas monochromes, is the product of the artist’s interest in topology: the mathematical study of shapes and spaces. Works from this series, such as Miter, Ray, Trans Ray (2014), present the viewer with an orderly visual field that is repeatedly and frustratingly disrupted by oscillating areas of recession and projection, shadow and light, negative and positive space.

A major solo exhibition of Auerbach’s work was organized by Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2011), and traveled to Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2012), and Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2013). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012 and 2013); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013); Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2014); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2015–16); and the Kitchen, New York (2016). Auerbach has also participated in the New Museum Triennial (2009) and the Whitney Biennial (2010). She was the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship, The Fleischhacker Foundation (2008); SECA Art Award, SFMOMA (2008); and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2011). Auerbach lives and works in New York.

Hiro Kone is Nicky Mao, a New York City based musician and producer. Her full-length LP “Pure Expenditure” for Dais Records was premiered at Berlin Atonal 2018, following the release of “The Ghost of Georges Bataille”, a collaborative album with Drew McDowall (Compound Eye, Coil) on BANK Records NYC in Spring of 2018.

In 2014, she released two EPs back to back. “The Unmoved Mover” (Group Tightener), seen as an extension of her previous Self-Titled EP (Bitterroots, 2012) it envisioned the factions and movements in the human psyche and soul from an indivisible prime source. While, “Fallen Angels” (Geographic North) in a nod to Wong Kar Wai, sourced Mao’s earliest memories of childhood in Hong Kong, repurposing vibrant fragments of the past through a disorienting array of sonic imagery. She followed this series of EPs with a full-length entitled “Love Is the Capital” in 2017.

Hiro Kone has participated in several collaborations, most notably a live score for Cinema 16 at The International House of Philadelphia (2012), “A Raga for Moog and Violin” with Arp (Geographic North, 2016), music for David Van Tieghem x 10 Fits and Starts (RVNG Intl, 2013), and a live reimagining of Little Annie Anxiety’s 1984 album “Soul Possession” (Pioneer Works, 2017).