Tara Donovan

Renowned American artist Tara Donovan (born 1969) creates sculptural objects of enigmatic beauty by utilizing and experimenting with simple, everyday objects such as Scotch tape, drinking straws, paper plates, needles, plastic rods, toothpicks, mylar and buttons. At first these abstract objects resemble enlarged cellular structures, or living organisms from the depths of the ocean. "What I'm striving for is to be an alchemist and transcend the material," Donovan says. "It's more of a mimicking of the way of nature, the way things actually grow." Her method is also allied to an American Minimalist sculptural tradition that includes artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Irwin and James Turrell. This volume, with its handsome mirror-paper cover and debossing, presents eight works made between 2004 and 2012, as installed at the Arp Museum in Germany and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.