Executed in 2011, Tauba Auerbach's Untitled (Fold) is a shimmering test.mes nt to the Modernist obsession with surface. Part of the artist's celebrated Fold series, the present work refuses traditional categorisation by medium; it is at once a sculpture, painting, topographic map, tapestry and texile. Auerbach herself refers to the liminal space between painting and sculpture as the ‘2.5^th dimension’ and uses this grey area as a framework for exploring her interest in spatial and temporal dimensionality. Materially, Untitled (Fold) is best described as a two-dimensional canvas that mimics crumpled cloth through the illusion of multi-directional folds that ripple through the paper-like surface. Tonally the work is luminous, and the implied contours increase the gentle interplay of light and shade within the work. Auerbach's Fold paintings have received widespread critical acclaim since their debut in 2009, and the present work was included in one of the artist's most important international exhibitions, Tauba Auerbach: Tetrachromat, which travelled to Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö and WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels as part of Tauba Auerbach: Tetrachromat between 2011 and 2013.

To create these paintings Auerbach first crumples and folds her canvases. She then irons or presses the flattened creases, before directionally spray painting the surface – which now possesses a stiffened materiality of hardened peaks evocative of mountainous topographies. Once the application of paint is complete, the artist flattens the material onto the canvas stretcher. The result is a flat surface which, in its apparent three-dimensionality, attests to the physical manipulation that occurred during the creative process. Upon viewing, we initially comprehend the work as a three-dimensional piece. It is only upon close inspection that the creases and folds dissolve before our eyes and we are left with an entirely flat surface. In this sense the work is optically challenging. We must switch between two modes of viewing, the first to apprehend the entirety and the second to visually deconstruct the whole.

By dismantling different dimensional fields, Auerbach challenges our understanding of perception and reconfigures our experience of viewing. In drawing our attention to the changed state of the canvas we are prompted to consider alternate temporal dimensions and are reminded that the canvas depicts actual folds that have occurred in t.mes . Auerbach notes: "The pigment acts like a raking light and freezes a likeness of the contoured materials onto itself. It develops like a photo as I paint. The record of that topological moment is carried forward after the material is stretched flat. Each point on the surface contains a record of itself in that previous state" (Christopher Bedford, Dear Painter …, Frieze Magazine, Issue 145, March 2012, online). In simultaneously confronting the viewer’s temporal and spatial understanding, Tauba Auerbach deconstructs established modes of viewing. The result is to centre our focus on the limits of our own perceptive abilities and to point towards the spectral possibilities and hyper-spatial territories that, although inaccessible to the senses, might lay within reach of the imagination.