Tauba Auerbach

Tauba Auerbach was born in 1981 in San Francisco, California, and lives and works in New York City. They earned a BA in Visual Studies from Stanford University in 2003. After graduating, Auerbach apprenticed at New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco, a traditional sign-painting shop, an experience that shaped a lasting interest in typography, systems, and the mechanics of how images and text are constructed.

Auerbach's practice spans the Fold series of painted canvases that simulate creased and crumpled paper, the Weave paintings built from interlaced strips of canvas, works exploring axonometric and non-Euclidean space, artist's books, and sculptural and glass-based work. Early recognition included inclusion in the New Museum's Younger Than Jesus (2009) and the 2010 Whitney Biennial, followed by the SECA Art Award from SFMOMA and a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, both in 2008. A solo survey, The New Ambidextrous Universe, was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 2014, and the traveling exhibition Tetrachromat moved through Bergen Kunsthall, Malmo Konsthall, and Wiels, Brussels, in 2011 and 2012. In 2018, Auerbach presented Flow Separation, a public commission on a New York Harbor pilot boat with the Public Art Fund, the same year as the two-person exhibition INDUCTION with composer Eliane Radigue at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. A survey titled S v Z was mounted at SFMOMA in 2021, and Tide, a major exhibition, was presented at the Fridericianum in Kassel across 2023 and 2024. Auerbach is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, Esther Schipper, and STANDARD (Oslo); a 2026 exhibition, Easy Assembly, marked their second show with Esther Schipper.

Auerbach's work is consistently discussed in relation to systems of perception and representation: how folded paper, woven canvas, or a printed grid can encode information about space, vision, and the body. Institutional recognition has been steady rather than sudden, moving from group exposure at the New Museum and the Whitney Biennial in the late 2000s to a run of solo institutional presentations, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, and a full SFMOMA survey in 2021. Writers covering the Fridericianum's Tide exhibition and the Public Art Fund commission Flow Separation have tended to frame Auerbach's practice as bridging conceptual rigor with a strong sense of material craft, a combination traced back to their formative apprenticeship as a sign painter.

Auerbach's auction record is Untitled (Fold), which sold at Phillips in October 2015 for approximately USD 2,285,000 (about GBP 1.4 million including fees). Market data trackers report other Fold-series and related paintings selling in the mid to high six figures, alongside lower results for prints and multiples. Compared to peers with deeper institutional exposure, Auerbach's public auction history is relatively thin, with results concentrated in a handful of high-value paintings rather than a dense, continuous sales record.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Auerbach, so provenance and verification run through the artist's representing galleries, Paula Cooper Gallery, Esther Schipper, and STANDARD (Oslo). The relatively small number of public auction results, anchored by the October 2015 Phillips sale of Untitled (Fold), means that any single result should be read in the context of the specific work and series rather than as a smooth market trend. Auerbach's museum collecting base, spanning MoMA, the Guggenheim, Moderna Museet, and the Centre Pompidou, is the strongest available signal of long-term institutional durability.