THE TYRANNY OF THE SMALL
by Charlie Finch



The recent announcement that a British team of scientists has "photographed" for the first time a single molecule, of the obscure metal pentacene, makes Tauba Auerbach's new show at Deitch Projects simultaneously very relevant and anti-climactic. Using a tiny graphite stylus to penetrate the repeated patterns of a molecular structure, the scientists produced an image of an object one-millionth the size of a grain of sand, an image that turns out to resemble some of the black blobs in Robert Motherwell's celebrated painting series "Elegy to the Spanish Republic."

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