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.

Photo: courtesy Sarah Sze studio
#SarahSze
Website
Exhibitions

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
Sarah Sze writes on a recent collage.

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.

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.

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

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.
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
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.
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

Honor
Sarah Sze
2022 Asia Arts Game Changer Awards
Sarah Sze has been selected to receive a 2022 Asia Arts Game Changer Award. The award, presented by Asia Society at a gala on May 19, 2022, honors important figures across the arts who have made a significant impact on society and brings together artists, arts professionals, collectors, and Asia Society trustees and patrons to celebrate excellence in the arts from across Asia and the diaspora. Asia Society is the leading educational organization dedicated to promoting mutual understanding and strengthening partnerships among peoples, leaders, and institutions of Asia and the United States in a global context.
Photo: Deborah Feingold

Support
The Met 150
Limited-Edition Print Portfolio
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has released The Met 150, a limited-edition print portfolio featuring works by twelve contemporary artists from around the world who have a strong history and connection with the museum, including Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Sarah Sze. Commissioned in celebration of the museum’s 150th anniversary in 2020, the portfolios are produced in an edition of sixty by the renowned artists’ workshop Gemini G.E.L in Los Angeles. The twelve signed prints are housed together in a red linen clamshell box and are accompanied by essays written by the Met director Max Hollein and Sharon Coplan Hurowitz, co-publisher. Proceeds from sales support the museum. To purchase a portfolio, contact the Mezzanine Gallery at the Met Store at + 1 212 650 2908.
Ed Ruscha, Boom Town, 2021 © Ed Ruscha

Fundraiser
Artist Plate Project 2021
Coalition for the Homeless
Launching November 16, 2021, 10am est
Limited-edition bone china plates produced by Prospect and featuring artwork by more than forty artists—including Virgil Abloh, Urs Fischer, Helen Frankenthaler, Alex Israel, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Ed Ruscha, Sarah Sze, Tom Wesselmann, Jonas Wood, and Christopher Wool—will be sold through Artware Editions to raise funds for the Coalition’s lifesaving programs. The funds raised by the sale of the plates will provide food, crisis services, housing, and other critical aid to thousands of people experiencing homelessness and instability. The purchase of one plate can feed one hundred homeless and hungry New Yorkers.
Jonas Wood, Clipping Plate, 2021 © Jonas Wood
Museum Exhibitions

Closed
Sarah Sze in
Critical Zones
May 23, 2020–January 9, 2022
ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany
zkm.de
This exhibition invites visitors to engage with the critical situation of the earth in a novel and diverse way and to explore new modes of coexistence between all forms of life. In order to remedy the generally prevailing disorientation and dissension in society, politics, and ecology with regard to the changing state of the planet, the exhibition project sets up an imaginary cartography, considering the earth as a network of “critical zones.” Work by Sarah Sze is included.
Sarah Sze, Flash Point (Timekeeper), 2018 © Sarah Sze. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto, M3 Studio

Closed
Sarah Sze in
On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale
September 10, 2021–January 9, 2022
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
artgallery.yale.edu
On the Basis of Art celebrates the achievements of women artists who have graduated from Yale University. Presented on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College and the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the University, who came to study at the Yale School of the Fine Arts when it opened in 1869—the exhibition features works drawn entirely from the Yale University Art Gallery’s collection. The exhibition title refers to a phrase in Title IX, the landmark 1972 US federal law declaring that no one in an education program receiving federal financial assistance could be discriminated against “on the basis of sex.” Work by Sarah Sze is included.
Sarah Sze, Mirror with Landscape Leaning (Fragment Series), 2015, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut © Sarah Sze

Closed
Sarah Sze
Fifth Season
June 26–November 8, 2021
Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York
collections.stormking.org
To accompany Fallen Sky (2021), Sarah Sze’s new permanent outdoor sculptural commission at Storm King, the artist has created an immersive installation that spans fifty feet in length, creating a portal through the gallery that houses it. The work, Fifth Season (2021), considers landscape as a timeless preoccupation of artists but refuses the impulse to present the natural world as comforting or coherent, instead depicting it as fragile and in flux.
Sarah Sze, Fifth Season, 2021, installation view, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York © Sarah Sze

Closed
Sarah Sze
Through October 2021
Tate Modern, London
www.tate.org.uk
Sarah Sze’s work Seamless (1999) is on display in a room on the fourth floor of the Boiler House at Tate Modern, paired with a work by Piet Mondrian.
Sarah Sze, Seamless, 1999 (detail) © Sarah Sze