TARA DONOVAN
Pace is pleased to present a focused survey of Tara Donovan’s work from the last 20 years at its Tokyo gallery.
May 17 – July 3, 2025
Known for her process- and system-based work across multiple mediums and dimensions, Donovan began her career in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Drawing on the formal languages of the California Light and Space movement, Minimalism, and Postminimalism, she deftly manipulates and transforms everyday materials and objects—from buttons, plastic straws, Styrofoam cups, pencils, CD-ROM discs, and pins to readymade screens and Slinky toys—into shapeshifting sculptures, installations, drawings, and prints that explore the possibilities and limits of human perception. Her phenomenological works both use and misuse nontraditional materials, turning them into visually dazzling compositions without obliterating their fundamental essences or histories as objects from daily life.
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 site—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.
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.