Comment on Tara Donovan show at Pace Palo Alto gallery

A combination of sculpture and framed installations, on view at the gallery through March 5, Tara Donovan — both the artist and the exhibition — invites the viewers to make the art their own without too much outside interference. “Once you see it, and walk around it, and just experience it, I think it’s such a beautiful experience that you go through,” said Elizabeth Sullivan, president of Pace Palo Alto. Pace Palo Alto’s latest exhibition is the result of a relationship between the New York artist and the Pace Gallery that’s been in place for more than a decade now. Pace, a contemporary art gallery in New York City with satellite locations across the world, has grown in the past few years to include two spaces in the Bay Area and one in Menlo Park. The bulk of the collection, including two sculptures and pieces from Donovan’s latest series, “Compositions (Cards),” is at Pace Palo Alto’s main downtown gallery, while art fans and shopping enthusiasts alike can also find her work at the Cartier jewelry boutique in the Stanford Shopping Center — a satellite exhibit of two of Donovan’s “Drawings (Pins)” pieces are on display at the store. In 2014, “Untitled” was unveiled at Pace Menlo Park, and her work has been featured in other Bay Area shows since, all the while garnering more fans. Donovan explores the complexity of industrial media alongside the abstraction of light and space specifically because she believes this technique lends itself well to timelessness. Universal appeal is deliberate.