TAUBA AUERBACH

In thirteen pointillist paintings, multicolored fields coalesce into images of soap foams, captured through a microscope.

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

* 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.

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

* 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.

* 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.

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

Courtesy Esther Schipper.