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New Accession Highlight: Corona

Visited the back Rowland Gallery lately? It’s filled with a rotating selection of new accessions, including Corona, by Athena Tacha.

Corona by Athena Tacha

Athena Tacha (American, b. Greece 1936), Corona, 1983, felt-tip pen on graph rag vellum paper, 24 x 28 in., gift of the artist, 2020.20.3

Tacha employs shape, repetition, discontinuity, and color to explore forms and rhythms she observes in nature. She has used the term ‘cosmocentric’ to describe her quest to understand and depict the universe’s varied systems and their relationships to humankind. Composed with a mass of individually colored blocks on a sheet of graph paper, Corona charts the Sun’s energy and thermonuclear processes as they radiate from its surface into space. In Tacha’s own words, “there is no element more essential to agriculture—and to life on Earth altogether—than the light and heat of the Sun.”

Tacha works in many different mediums but may be best known for her site-specific sculptures and monuments such as Water Links II, a black and white granite sculpture and water feature created in 2006–2008 for the UW-Madison Graduate School of Business.