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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

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

Sarah Sze, Untitled (Tokyo), 2008 (detail) Mixed media, overall dimensions variableInstallation view, Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo, 2008© 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, Timekeeper, 2016 (detail) Mixed media, including mirrors, wood, stainless steel, archival pigment prints, video projectors, lamps, desks, stools, and stone, overall dimensions variableInstallation view, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 2016
© 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, 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, 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, Centrifuge, 2017 Mixed media, including mirrors, wood, bamboo, stainless steel, archival pigment prints, video projectors, ceramic, acrylic paint, and salt, overall dimensions variableInstallation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2017–28© Sarah Sze

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, 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, 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, Metronome, 2023 Mixed media, including projectors, paper, wood, and stainless steel, overall dimensions variableInstallation view, Peckham Rye Station, London, 2023© Sarah Sze. Photo: Thierry Bal

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

About

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.

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Sarah Sze

Photo: courtesy Sarah Sze studio

Website

sarahsze.com

Sarah Sze: Timelapse

Sarah Sze: Timelapse

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.

Sarah Sze, Timekeeper

Sarah Sze: Timelapse

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.

Installation view, Pat Steir: Paintings, Gagosian, Rome, March 10–May 7, 2022. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto

Artist to Artist: Pat Steir and Sarah Sze

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.

Shorter Than the Day

Shorter Than the Day

Sarah Sze writes on a recent collage.

Featuring Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece 1 (1969) on its cover.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2020

The Summer 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece 1 (1969) on its cover.

Detail of Sarah Sze's multimedia installation Plein Air.

Sarah Sze: Anything Times Zero Is Zero

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.

Still from La Jetée (1962), directed by Chris Marker.

Shortlist
Five Films: Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze writes about five films that live as richly evocative images in her visual memory.

Sarah Sze, Dews Drew (Half-life), 2018.

Sarah Sze: Infinite Generation

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.

Video still of Sarah Sze speaking at a TED conference, Vancouver, BC, April 2019.

Sarah Sze: Art That Explores Time and Memory

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.

Frieze Sculpture New York: An Interview with Brett Littman

Frieze Sculpture New York: An Interview with Brett Littman

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.

Sarah Sze: In the Studio

Work in Progress
Sarah Sze: In the Studio

Join Sarah Sze in her studio as she prepares for an exhibition of new work in Rome.

Fairs, Events & Announcements

Sarah Sze, Turning and Turning, 2024 © Sarah Sze. Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Art Fair

Art Basel Hong Kong 2024

March 27–30, 2024
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
www.artbasel.com

Gagosian is participating in Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 with a selection of works by international contemporary artists. The works on view, which embrace a dizzying variety of subjects and approaches, see the participating artists identify fresh ways to disrupt established histories of abstraction and figuration, and instill sculptural and painterly representations of the natural world with complex cultural significance.

Sarah Sze, Turning and Turning, 2024 © Sarah Sze. Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Sarah Sze, Crisscross, 2021 © Sarah Sze. Photo: Daniel Spizzirri

In Conversation

Sarah Sze and Lorna Simpson
Moderated by Thelma Golden

Thursday, February 22, 2024, 6–8pm
Shah Garg Foundation, New York
www.shahgargfoundation.org

Join Sarah Sze and fellow artist Lorna Simpson in a conversation moderated by Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, on the occasion of the exhibition Making Their Mark, on view at the Shah Garg Foundation through March 23, 2024. Both artists are included in the exhibition, which showcases the work of more than seventy women artists from the last eight decades, bringing into vibrant relief their intergenerational relationships, formal and material breakthroughs, and historical impact as they aim to rechart art history through their singular, iconic practices.

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Sarah Sze, Crisscross, 2021 © Sarah Sze. Photo: Daniel Spizzirri

Sarah Sze, Times Zero, 2023 (detail) © Sarah Sze

Artist Talk

Sarah Sze

Saturday, February 3, 2024, 2pm
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
www.nashersculpturecenter.org

Sarah Sze will give a talk in conjunction with the opening of her solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, on view through August 18, 2024. She will discuss her site-specific installations which integrate painting, sculpture, images, sound, and video, and which engage with the surrounding architecture to create intimate systems that reference our rapidly changing world.

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Sarah Sze, Times Zero, 2023 (detail) © Sarah Sze

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Museum Exhibitions

Sarah Sze, Images That Images Beget, 2023 (detail) © Sarah Sze

On View

Sarah Sze

Through August 18, 2024
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
www.nashersculpturecenter.org

Sarah Sze invites viewers into a progression of site-specific works across three gallery spaces. Integrating painting, sculpture, images, sound, and video with the surrounding architecture, Sze’s new installations create intimate systems that reference our rapidly changing world. The exhibition blurs the boundaries between making and showing, process and product, the digital and material, and questions how objects acquire their meaning.

Sarah Sze, Images That Images Beget, 2023 (detail) © Sarah Sze

Installation view, Making Their Mark, Shah Garg Foundation, New York, November 2, 2023–March 23, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Joan Semmel, © Carol Bove, © Maria Lassnig, © 2024 Dana Schutz, © Cecily Brown

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Making Their Mark

November 2, 2023–March 23, 2024
Shah Garg Foundation, New York
www.shahgargfoundation.org

Making Their Mark, curated by Cecilia Alemani, showcases the works of more than seventy women artists from the last eight decades. The exhibition champions the lives and work of women artists, bringing into vibrant relief their intergenerational relationships, formal and material breakthroughs, and historical impact. Through drawings, mixed media, paintings, sculptures, and textile works, these artists aim to rechart art history through their singular, iconic practices. Work by Carol Bove, Jadé Fadojutimi, Sarah Sze, and Mary Weatherford is included.

Installation view, Making Their Mark, Shah Garg Foundation, New York, November 2, 2023–March 23, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Joan Semmel, © Carol Bove, © Maria Lassnig, © 2024 Dana Schutz, © Cecily Brown

Sarah Sze, METRONOME, 2023, installation view, Officine Grandi Riparazioni Torino, Turin, Italy © Sarah Sze. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

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Sarah Sze
METRONOME

November 3, 2023–February 11, 2024
Officine Grandi Riparazioni Torino, Turin, Italy
ogrtorino.it

METRONOME is an immersive installation by Sarah Sze commissioned and produced jointly by Officine Grandi Riparazioni Torino, Artangel, and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark. The atmospheric construction features cascading lines that emerge from the center of the room to create a mesmerizing model of a fragile world. A multitude of flickering videos illuminate the structure, swirling around the space, conveying the velocity and volatility of life in the age of the smartphone. An earlier iteration of this work was recently on view at Peckham Rye Station, London. 

Sarah Sze, METRONOME, 2023, installation view, Officine Grandi Riparazioni Torino, Turin, Italy © Sarah Sze. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Nancy Rubins, Diversifolia #1, 2017 © Nancy Rubins

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After “The Wild”
Contemporary Art from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection

March 24–October 1, 2023
Jewish Museum, New York
thejewishmuseum.org

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) was a generous supporter of his colleagues, who befriended and mentored countless younger artists. After his death, Annalee Newman, his widow, created the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation to help further the spirit of great art by providing grants. Diverse in style, training, background, and age, the foundation’s grantees—whose works make up this exhibition—share Newman’s seriousness of purpose, as well as his unrelenting drive to explore the outer limits of his own ideas. Work by Michael Heizer, Nancy Rubins, Richard Serra, and Sarah Sze is included.

Nancy Rubins, Diversifolia #1, 2017 © Nancy Rubins

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Press

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