Commissioned for Parco d’arte, FOAM is based on a series of paintings by the artist with the same title. The mosaic—made out of almost 100,000 glass paste tiles—recreates the intricate mesh of foam, with its particles forming bubbles, nodes, and swirls. The work was made by following a series of steps: first, the artist took a photograph of foam through a microscope, translated it into painting with thousands of hand-painted dots, and then transformed the image into a digital file, using software to create a diagram for expert artisans from Gallego Mosaici to render the image into mosaic. Located on the belvedere of the Park, FOAM acts as a backdrop connecting the large scale of the landscape to the small, inviting the viewer to find their own perspective between proximity and distance, blur and focus.
Through a broad range of media, including painting, photography, weaving, calligraphy, and glass sculpture, Tauba Auerbach explores the dimensions of the microscopic and the macroscopic, often using fractals, helices, and meanders. As she describes, "I’m interested in the edges of where a system coheres and where it starts to fray and come apart."