Sarah Sze
Metronome, 2023
Mixed media, including projectors, paper, wood, and stainless steel, overall dimensions variable
Installation view, Peckham Rye Station, London, 2023
© Sarah Sze. Photo: Thierry Bal
Sarah Sze
Blind Curve, 2021
Oil, acrylic, acrylic polymers, ink, aluminum, diabond, and wood, 84 × 118 ¼ inches (213.4 × 300.4 cm)
© Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze
Fallen Sky, 2021
Stainless steel, 36 × 36 feet (11 × 11 m)
Permanent installation, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York
© Sarah Sze. Photo: Nicholas Knight
Sarah Sze
Twice Twilight, 2020
Mixed media, wood, stainless steel, acrylic, ceramic, video projectors, and archival pigment prints, overall dimensions variable
Installation view, Sarah Sze: Night into Day, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, October 24, 2020–May30, 2021
© Sarah Sze. Photo: Luc Boegly
Sarah Sze
Shorter Than the Day, 2020
Powder coated aluminum and steel, overall dimensions variable, commissioned by LaGuardia Gateway Partners in partnership with Public Art Fund
Permanent installation, LaGuardia Airport, New York
© Sarah Sze. Photo: Nicholas Knight
Sarah Sze
Centrifuge, 2017
Mixed media, including mirrors, wood, bamboo, stainless steel, archival pigment prints, video projectors, ceramic, acrylic paint, and salt, overall dimensions variable
Installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2017–28
© Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze
Blueprint for a Landscape, 2017
Porcelain tile, 13,000 square feet, 96th Street New York City Subway station, commissioned by MTA Arts & Design and New York City Transit
© Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze
Timekeeper, 2016 (detail)
Mixed media, including mirrors, wood, stainless steel, archival pigment prints, video projectors, lamps, desks, stools, and stone, overall dimensions variable
Installation view, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 2016
© Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze
Landscape of Events Suspended Indefinitely (Hammock), 2015 (detail)
Mixed media, including acrylic paint, string, cord, metal, stone, and archival photograph on Tyvek, 115 × 190 × 42 inches (292.1 × 482.6 × 106.7 cm)
Installation view, Biennale di Venezia, 2015
© Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze
Triple Point (Observatory), 2013
Mirrors, photograph of rock printed on Tyvek, wood, aluminum, metal, and mixed media, overall dimensions variable
Installation view, Biennale di Venezia, 2013
© Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze
Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat), 2011
Stainless steel and wood, 9 × 22 × 21 feet (2.7 × 6.7 × 6.4 m)
Installation view, High Line, New York, 2011–12
© Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze
Untitled (Tokyo), 2008 (detail)
Mixed media, overall dimensions variable
Installation view, Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo, 2008
© Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze
Hidden Relief, 2001
Mixed media, 168 × 60 × 12 inches (426.7 × 152.4 × 30.5 cm)
Installation view, Asia Society, New York, 2001–04
© Sarah Sze
Art is a timekeeper; it endows breath into materials. It is a traveling message between humans across centuries.
—Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze gleans objects and images from worlds both physical and digital, assembling them into complex multimedia works that shift scale between microscopic observation and macroscopic perspective on the infinite. A peerless bricoleur, Sze moves with a light touch across proliferating media. Her dynamic, generative body of work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation while always addressing the precarious nature of materiality and grappling with matters of entropy and temporality.
Born in Boston, Sze earned a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1997. While still in graduate school, she challenged the very nature of sculpture, at MoMA PS1 in New York, by burrowing into the walls of the building, creating sculptural portals and crafting ecosystems that radically transformed the host architecture. A year later, for her first solo institutional exhibition, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she presented Many a Slip (1999), an immersive installation sprawling through several rooms in which flickering projections were scattered among complex assemblages of everyday objects. This marked Sze’s first foray into video, which has since become a central medium of her installations. Citing the Russian Constructivist notion of the “kiosk” as a key inspiration, she conceived subsequent installations as portable stations for the interchange of images and the exchange of information. Sze’s work was included in the 48th Biennale di Venezia and the Carnegie International in 1999; the Whitney Biennial in 2000; and the Bienal de São Paulo in 2002. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003.
In 2023, Sarah Sze’s immersive video installation Pictures at an Exhibition made its debut at the Thailand Biennale, titled The Open World and codirected by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gridthiya Gaweewong in Chiang Rai. On the occasion of the work’s inclusion in Sze’s 2024 exhibition at Gagosian, Paris, she met with Tiravanija to discuss thriving in chaos, making room for experiences in time, and her materials.
Francine Prose ruminates on temporality, fragility, and strength following a visit to Sarah Sze’s exhibition Timelapse at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
In this video, Sarah Sze elaborates on the creation of her solo exhibition Timelapse, on view through September 10, 2023. The show features a series of site-specific installations throughout the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, that explore her ongoing reflection on how our experience of time and place is continuously reshaped in relationship to the constant stream of objects, images, and information in today’s digitally and materially saturated world. In Sze’s reimagination of the Guggenheim’s iconic architecture, designed in the 1940s by Frank Lloyd Wright, the building becomes a public timekeeper reminding us that timelines are built through shared experience and memory.
On the occasion of her exhibition of recent paintings, presented at Gagosian in Rome, Pat Steir met with fellow artist Sarah Sze for a wide-ranging discussion—from shared inspirations and influences to the role of chance, contingency, place, and time in painting.
Sarah Sze writes on a recent collage.
The Summer 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece 1 (1969) on its cover.
Hear Sarah Sze speak about her most recent work, including the panel painting Picture Perfect (Times Zero) and the multimedia installation Plein Air (Times Zero) (both 2020). Discussing the relationship between painting and sculpture in her practice, she explains how she creates structure and its inverse, instability, in her layering of images, putting the viewer in the position of active discovery.
Sarah Sze writes about five films that live as richly evocative images in her visual memory.
Louise Neri talks with Sarah Sze about the new primacy of the image in her explorations between and across mediums. They spoke on the occasion of an exhibition of Sze’s work at Gagosian, Rome, comprising collaged panel paintings, a large-scale video installation, and an outdoor sculpture fashioned from a natural boulder.
Join Sarah Sze as she talks about the questions that drive her work. She describes creating immersive experiences that blur the lines between time, memory, and space—and between art and life.
The inaugural presentation of Frieze Sculpture New York at Rockefeller Center opened on April 25, 2019. Before the opening, Brett Littman, the director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum and the curator of this exhibition, told Wyatt Allgeier about his vision for the project and detailed the artworks included.
Join Sarah Sze in her studio as she prepares for an exhibition of new work in Rome.
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