There is a particular kind of beauty in watching something refuse to hold still.

Water moves. Foam expands and collapses. Warm currents meet cold ones. Air and liquid negotiate an unstable boundary. Light changes what we think we are seeing.

For Tauba Auerbach, these moments of instability are not failures of order. They are opportunities to discover another kind of structure.

That idea animates Zephyr, Zephyr, the artist’s latest exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. On view from September 10 through October 24, 2026, at the gallery’s 521 West 21st Street location, the exhibition brings together new works across painting, photography, sound, and kinetic sculpture. Together, they examine currents and concurrence—forms of movement and relationship that exist between systems rather than within fixed categories.

The exhibition is quintessentially Auerbach: intellectually rigorous but materially playful, precise without being rigid, and deeply interested in the point where a system begins to behave unpredictably.

When Foam Becomes a Landscape

At the center of Zephyr, Zephyr is a new generation of pointillist paintings based on microscopic photographs of liquid foam.

The premise is deceptively simple.

Foam is ordinary. It appears on the surface of a drink, along the edge of the sea, or wherever air becomes temporarily suspended in liquid. Under a microscope, however, it reveals a complex architecture of cells, boundaries, reflections, and irregular geometries.

Auerbach translates these microscopic structures into paintings made from hand-painted dots. The dots gather into refractive images on sprayed panels that float slightly away from the wall, introducing a subtle physical separation between the artwork and its architectural surroundings.

Earlier works in the series investigated the architecture of foam itself. The new paintings shift attention toward what happens when light encounters that architecture.

The distinction is significant.

Instead of asking only what foam looks like, Auerbach asks what it does to light—and, by extension, what light does to perception.

The paintings become less like representations of microscopic photographs and more like transformations of optical phenomena.

The Unruly Edge

Auerbach has described foam as existing at an edge: between ocean and air, or liquid and atmosphere.

That boundary is central to Zephyr, Zephyr.

Foam occupies a transitional state. It belongs simultaneously to two domains without completely belonging to either. Its forms are recognizable but never entirely predictable.

There is no conventional grid organizing every cell, yet recurring geometric tendencies emerge.

This is precisely the kind of paradox that has long defined Auerbach’s practice.

The artist studies structures and connectivity across scales, from the microscopic to the cosmic, while frequently inventing processes and tools that encourage materials to behave in unexpected ways. Her practice extends across painting, weaving, glass, photography, video, calligraphy, and musical-instrument design.

In Zephyr, Zephyr, foam becomes a particularly elegant model for that approach.

It is disorder that produces form.

Painting Light Rather Than Objects

The new pointillist paintings also complicate the traditional relationship between image and subject.

Auerbach begins with something that exists in the physical world, photographs it through a microscope, and then reconstructs it through thousands of individual marks.

By the time the viewer encounters the finished work, the original foam is several transformations away.

The painting is therefore not a simple image of foam.

It is an interpretation of an optical event.

The hand-painted dots create a tension between mechanical-looking precision and unmistakably human labor. Viewed closely, individual marks become apparent; from farther away, they merge into refractive fields.

This shifting scale is essential.

The work continually asks the viewer to move between parts and whole—to see dots as dots, then forget them as dots and experience the larger image.

The act of looking becomes part of the artwork’s structure.

Currents That Cannot Be Seen

Photography expands the exhibition’s investigation from microscopic foam to moving water.

Auerbach presents groups of photographs made using a heat-sensitive camera attachment to record hot and cold currents in water. Primarily black and white and presented in a new, smaller format, the photographs reveal variations and movements invisible to the naked eye.

Here, the camera does something the human eye cannot.

It detects difference through temperature rather than conventional light.

The photographs consequently operate as evidence of invisible activity. Water may appear calm, but beneath the surface, currents are moving, temperatures are changing, and energy is circulating.

Auerbach’s photographs make that hidden movement visible without turning it into a conventional scientific illustration.

Instead, they remain enigmatic.

They look like abstractions because the phenomenon they record exists outside ordinary visual experience.

Sound Enters the Picture

Zephyr, Zephyr also extends Auerbach’s interest in the relationship between visual structure and sound.

Suspended around the gallery are glass chimes producing crystalline, stochastic sounds.

Their presence changes the exhibition’s rhythm.

The viewer is no longer encountering only things to look at. Sound becomes another form of movement, another way of registering environmental change.

The chimes introduce an element of chance. Their sound is not simply a fixed composition repeating at predetermined intervals. Instead, the gallery becomes a space in which physical movement can produce unpredictable acoustic results.

That idea mirrors the paintings.

Both the dots and the sounds participate in systems without being completely controlled by a single overarching pattern.

Sculpture in Motion

The exhibition’s final component is kinetic.

Pairs of moving sculptures gently rotate in relation to one another, introducing another form of coordinated movement into the gallery.

Their motion is restrained rather than spectacular.

That subtlety matters.

Auerbach is not attempting to overwhelm the viewer with mechanical spectacle. Instead, the sculptures make relationships visible through movement.

One object moves in relation to another. A change in one position affects how the pair is perceived.

The result is a physical analogy for the exhibition’s larger interest in concurrence: things happening together, influencing one another, without necessarily following a single predetermined path.

From Microscopic Foam to the Cosmic

Auerbach’s work has consistently resisted strict divisions between art and scientific thinking.

Her practice is grounded in questions of perception, logic, systems, structures, mathematics, language, and space. Paula Cooper Gallery notes that she studies structure and connectivity across scales ranging from the microscopic to the cosmic.

That background makes the title Zephyr, Zephyr particularly evocative.

A zephyr is a gentle breeze, something almost intangible. It cannot easily be held or seen directly, yet its presence becomes apparent through its effects.

That is also how much of Auerbach’s exhibition operates.

We do not necessarily see the current itself.

We see what the current produces.

We do not see temperature moving through water.

We see its photographic trace.

We do not see the microscopic structure of foam with the naked eye.

We see its transformation into dots, light, and color.

We do not control every sound produced by the glass chimes.

We experience the consequences of movement.

The Beauty of Coordinated Instability

The exhibition ultimately proposes a different way of understanding turbulence.

Turbulence is usually associated with disorder: rough water, chaotic air, unpredictable motion.

Auerbach does not deny that instability.

Instead, she looks for the structures that emerge inside it.

Foam creates temporary geometries. Currents reveal hidden relationships. Sound emerges through chance. Sculptures move through paired systems.

Across these different media, instability becomes generative.

The gallery describes the works collectively as giving turbulence a “fruitful and coordinated form.”

That phrase captures the exhibition’s central paradox.

Order does not necessarily require rigid control.

Sometimes order emerges because systems are allowed to interact.

Auerbach’s Continuing Investigation of Perception

Auerbach has built a career around making familiar systems strange again.

Her 2018 Flow Separation public art project in New York Harbor, her major survey S v Z at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and her subsequent institutional exhibitions demonstrate a practice that moves comfortably between painting, sculpture, design, performance, and experimental materials.

Zephyr, Zephyr continues that trajectory without simply repeating it.

The exhibition is quieter than a spectacle-driven installation. Its power comes from concentration.

A microscopic photograph becomes a painting.

A temperature becomes an image.

A breeze becomes a metaphor.

A chance vibration becomes music.

A pair of rotating objects becomes a study in relationship.

At Paula Cooper Gallery, Tauba Auerbach invites viewers to look closely at phenomena that normally pass unnoticed.

And in doing so, Zephyr, Zephyr suggests that the most compelling structures may be the ones that only become visible when we stop demanding perfect order.