Executed in 2009.

A shattered black rectangle exquisitely articulated in black ink is the subject of Tara Donovan’s Untitled. These angular and shard-like forms impart a sense of movement through their fracturing and breaking apart. To create the work, Donovan inked a panel of glass, broke it with a hammer, and then pressed it to a paper sheet. The process and resulting composition recalls a graphic mosaic and allows the artist to incorporate elements of chance, similar to Jean Arp’s Dada collages using torn paper. Donovan’s art reflects her long-term interest in assembling accumulations of objects or forms, at times from everyday materials such as paper plates, pencils, and Styrofoam cups, in an obsessive manner, resulting in abstract environments. Her process includes a systematic structure of self-defined rules and has positioned her practice in the traditions of Minimalist and Conceptual artists such as Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse. Her works appear in institutional collections such as Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York.