For her exhibition at the Nasher, Sarah Sze invites viewers to become immersed in newly conceived works that explore how memory marks time and space and how art negotiates image and object. Here, Sze creates a series of moments, activated by the viewers' encounter with the works, that emphasize how experience is continually reshaped by the constant stream of visual information around us, and the role of memory in forming our perception.
The resulting installations eschew neatly delineated artistic categorizations in favor of questioning the potential for different mediums: what defines a sculpture, a video, a painting? Often with two-dimensional planes expanding into volumetric space and disintegrating again into flat images that suggest alternate dimensions, Sze playfully engages the viewer to wonder what is physical, what is digital and what is real. The tenuous threshold between making and showing, process and product, digital and material dissolves in these generative new works that ultimately examine how objects and images acquire meaning.
Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze has been making immersive installations that challenge the static nature of art and transform the spaces they inhabit. From handmade environments to abstract landscapes, Sze creates a visual world that is endlessly evolving, degrading, and generating new ways of seeing. Appearing at once arbitrary and meticulously planned, in the midst of coming together and falling apart, her work contains layered references to the world's rapidly changing, image-driven digital present. Working across painting, sculpture, sound, print, drawing, video, and architecture, Sze's work amplifies the myriad ephemeral details of contemporary life, making palpable poetry of the often ineffable aspects of human experience.
About Sarah Sze Over the course of her artistic career, Sarah Sze has created immersive installations that challenge the static nature of art and examine how images and objects can ascribe meaning to the rapidly changing world we inhabit. In recent years, Sze has returned to painting, the medium in which she was first trained. Comprising constellations of painted and collaged elements, her expansive abstract landscapes explore a visual world that is constantly evolving, degrading, and generating new ways of seeing. From May to September 2023, a major solo exhibition of Sze's latest works titled Timelapse was shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Sze was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and a Radcliffe Fellowship in 2005. In 2013, Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition titled Triple Point. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial (2000), Carnegie International (1999) and several international biennials, including Berlin (1998), Guangzhou (2015), Liverpool (2008), Lyon (2009) and Venice (1999 and 2015). Sze’s works are held in several permanent art collections, including MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Foundation Cartier in Paris, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate in London. Permanent public works include pieces at LaGuardia Airport and The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, and the Seattle Opera House. In 2021 Sze unveiled a new permanent commission for the Storm King Art Center, New York.