Tauba Auerbach: Zephyr, Zephyr at Paula Cooper Gallery

Tauba Auerbach's Zephyr, Zephyr fills the Chelsea space at 521 West 21st Street with a family of new works in several media, all concerned with currents and the way separate motions coincide. The show runs through October 24, 2026.

The core of the exhibition is a new generation of pointillist paintings based on liquid foam photographed through a microscope. Hand-painted dots gather into refractive images on sprayed panels, which are mounted so that they hover slightly off the wall. Earlier paintings in the series examined the architecture of foam; these turn to how foam behaves in light.

Auerbach describes foam as a substance of edges, found where the sea meets the shore or at the rim of a glass. It marks an unruly boundary between liquid and air where order in the usual sense breaks down. There is no grid, overarching structure or repeating pattern, only a set of tendencies that cause certain geometric relationships to arise and recur.

The photographs record hot and cold currents of water using a heat-sensitive camera attachment. They appear in a new, small format, primarily in black and white, and bring out variations and movements the naked eye cannot see.

Sound enters the show through glass chimes suspended around the gallery, producing crystalline, stochastic tones. Pairs of moving sculptures also rotate gently in relation to one another. Taken together, the works present turbulence in a productive, coordinated form.

Auerbach is an artist represented by the gallery, and the exhibition moves across painting, photography, sculpture and sound while keeping its attention on physical phenomena.