Women artists who have questioned what art is – and from what materials it can be made

Auerbach is interested in the way structures and patterns operate in systems such as language, physics and geometry. Some of her other notable projects — which often operate at the borders of mathematics, science and craft — include Flow Separation (2018), featuring a boat painted in a contemporary version of ‘dazzle’ camouflage, and her series of marbled papers. ‘A person who spends their days marbling learns a lot about fluid dynamics — about viscosity, flow patterns, surface tensions, relative density — all through their fingertips,’ she has said.

Embossment Painting #14 (2011) is part of Auerbach’s exploration of colour, light, form and negative space — or what she has termed ‘working in the fourth dimension’. It was made by placing objects acquired from a hardware store — including textured Plexiglas, chicken wire and rubber mats — over sheets of embossed paper and running them through a printing press. The raised surfaces were then airbrushed from raking angles and left to dry. For the final stage, the paper was flattened, leaving only a visually complex, two-dimensional record in colour of the object’s undulating topography.

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