Sarah Sze

Throughout her oeuvre, Sze embraces dichotomies—image and object, painting and sculpture—and allows each to inform the other. In Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat), a 2012 commission for the High Line in New York, she translated a single-point perspective line drawing into a three-dimensional sculpture as a habitat for native bird species that both camouflaged and underscored the in situ urban and natural environment. In 2013 Sze represented the United States at the 55th Biennale di Venezia with a total takeover of the American Pavilion. The title of the project, Triple Point, refers to the conditions at which water can be at once aqueous, gaseous, and solid and reflects Sze’s driving concern to create work that exists in many states at once. Two years later, for the subsequent Biennale, she took an opposite tack, creating a series of subtle interventions in a remote and abandoned walled garden that attested to her interest in that which is dismantled, liminal, and freed from its moorings. In 2017 a permanent tiled mural of a drawing titled Blueprint for a Landscape was unveiled at the 96th Street station of the Second Avenue subway in Manhattan, spanning its four entrances and entire block-long mezzanine.

Since 2018 Sze has returned to the foundations of painting with spirited investigations of the pictorial plane and a reignited interest in the role of the image in an era of image saturation. Adapting her processes of sculptural accumulation to a two-dimensional format, she has developed a process whereby she begins with a seed image as the foundation and then layers paint and collage materials in a generative and recursive process, in which the decisions she makes in one composition resonate in connected visual constellations that either persist or decay with time’s passage. She states, “In the age of the image, a painting is a sculpture. A sculpture is a marker in time.” In these detailed, dynamic, and highly colorful and textural paintings, Sze filters her distinctive visual language through diverse materials and mediums. With both force and delicacy, her art negotiates the line between order and chaos, evoking moments of flux and precariousness through feats of sheer materiality.