Artist: Tauba Auerbach

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Liquid foam requires a gentle grip. One can’t clutch it tightly.

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Foam’s formation depends not only on the right ingredients, but also the right kind of agitation. It’s a mixture and a type of mixing.

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Foam is both cellular and interconnected — like a three-dimensional mesh, partitioning and connecting space.

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Foam often exists at an edge, like the edge of the ocean or the edge of a glass. It’s the unruly boundary between two domains (liquid and air), where order in the traditional sense breaks down, and a new type of organization emerges. There is no grid, no overarching structure or repeating pattern, but instead, a set of tendencies, causing certain relationships to repeatedly arise.

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Foam is constantly shifting and always in flux. As one bubble bursts, its neighbors automatically rearrange themselves to fill the space left behind and minimize the membrane’s surface area.

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Foam is a distribution of two states of matter interspersed amongst each other.

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Esther Schipper Berlin presents Tauba Auerbach’s Easy Assembly, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery.

In 13 pointillist paintings, Tauba renders close-up images of soap foams, captured through a microscope. On panels ranging widely in size and floating slightly off the wall, millions of hand-painted dots gather into effervescent images over sprayed, multi-color fields. The paintings take three distinct approaches to color, two of which are new chapters in the Foam series presented here for the first time. Using various approaches to lighting and image processing, the paintings focus on nodes of connection, self-organization and how individual elements refract through one another.