ART-PRESENTATION: Sarah Sze

For more than two decades, Sarah Sze’s work has defied the limitations of artistic media, employing with equal facility sculpture, installation, video, photography, printmaking and painting. Sze has been credited with dismantling and re-envisioning the very potential of objects, simultaneously celebrating the particular relevance of sculpture in contemporary visual culture, while also expanding its definition.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Sarah Sze’s focus has been equally tuned to images, considering their materiality, transmutability, and ease of circulation in our increasingly digital existence. Originally trained as a painter, she has consistently looked through the lens of two-dimensionality, including color, line, form and image-making, to consider aspects of sculpture and installation. Sarah Sze in her her first solo exhibition in Paris since her presentation at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain more than two decades ago, pesents new works. Just as the postwar affichistes* elevated the accumulated visual grit of everyday urban life to the status of a painting, Sze’s large-scale panel paintings collapse multiple forms of picture making into an intricate but unified visual language. In some, photographic scraps are torn and visibly taped to the surfaces, resulting in abstracted tableaux that conjure pixelation while retaining the aura of the analog and the handmade. Sze layers paint over and under these jagged paper geometries, weaving them into each composition in sweeping arcs, thrumming lines, and shimmering gradients. In others, the textures are pure trompe l’oeil, achieved solely through photographic collage. In a series of four small paintings partly inspired by Piet Mondrian’s phasing of a tree motif into total abstraction, Sze begins with a seed image: a manipulated digital photograph of one of her previous paintings or sculptures, which then becomes the foundation for a new work. In this generative and recursive process, decisions made in one composition resonate in connected visual constellations that either persist or decay with the passage of time. Alongside these new paintings, Sze presents a new multimedia installation entitled “Plein Air” (2020) that demonstrates her continued fascination with the production and translation of images. Like many of her three-dimensional projects, the work combines intricate assemblage and video projection; it functions as a kind of tool or portal, pulling images from the world and presenting them in the gallery space in a transformed state. Thus, moving and static images are enmeshed with sculpture and architecture in a loop that conflates input and output, production and consumption. Also on view is “Double Wishbone” (2020), a sculpture comprised of delicate steel chains linked with “pure paint” Sze’s term for a ribbon of dried paint that is the autonomous trace of her process.

* Affichiste is the French word for a poster artist or poster designer.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, Duration: 18/3-30/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://gagosian.com

The Gagosian Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice due to the situation with the new coronavirus.