NEW YORK— Having recently added to her résumé a MacArthur "genius grant," a show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and a still-traveling retrospective (now at the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, in Cincinnati), Tara Donovan is surely floating on cloud nine. Yet true to form, her newest works, on view at PaceWildenstein’s 57th Street space from April 10 through May 2, rely on strikingly down-to-earth mediums. The artist is best known for her ethereal accumulations of utilitarian objects, such as toothpicks or drinking straws. In the two series of drawings displayed here, she is mining, she says, "the mark-making possibilities of glass and thread." Donovan constructs the pieces by splintering a heavily inked sheet of glass with a hammer or laying thread onto an inked plate. Then she presses the surface created with a sheet of paper. "The materials themselves are unstable," explains Donovan. "The glass is shattered, and the thread is unspooled, thus making each a distinct record of my action" — as if the art world weren’t already tracking her every move.

"Smash Success" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2009 Table of Contents.