Untitled, 2009

Tara Donovan  

Tara Donovan transforms humble, mass-produced materials such as paper plates, plastic cups, pencils, buttons, and pins into ethereal, large-scale sculptures and site-specific installations. Manipulating inherent properties of her chosen materials—the translucency of Scotch tape, say, or the malleability of a Slinky—Donovan creates works that revel in both the artificial and the natural worlds: They suggest cave formations, clouds, molecular structures, and other geological and biological forms. Donovan's embrace of singular materials and adherence to rule-based systems has aligned her practice with the legacies of minimallist artists such as Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse. Donovan received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999 and opened her first institutional exhibition that year, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She has since received solo shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and her work has sold for up to six figures on the secondary market. In 2008, Donovan was named a MacArthur fellow.