ART CITIES:London-Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze is known for her large-scale installations that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings, burrow into the ground, and stretch across museums. Sze studied painting and architecture, and intersected these disciplines to arrive at sculpture, where her formal interest in light, air and movement is coupled with an intuitive understanding of composition, colour and texture.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Victoria Miro Gallery Archive

Sze’s body of work addresses questions about the fragility of human behavior, the desire to model complex systems, and the impermanence of value and memory. To explore these ideas, she utilizes myriad everyday objects in her installations. Presented as traces of human behavior, these items, released from their commonplace duty, acquire a certain vitality and ambition. Assemblages of these objects become systems, capable of renewal, aspiration and decay, or repositories of memory and value. This is the artist’s first presentation in Europe since representing the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale and third solo show with the Victoria Miro Gallery, which will span all three spaces of the Gallery. Sarah Sze was artist in residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2013 – 2014. The installations presented in the Wharf Road galleries, made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, have been reconceived and reconfigured especially for the London exhibition. The exhibition will comprise of three installations – one on each floor – that the artist has conceived as a series of different experiments that explore the construction and measurement of space, mass, time, and volume through the use of materials. Common objects like rocks, newspapers, and furniture mutate from something known, to something foreign, fragile, newly composed, and entirely transformed. For the Mayfair gallery Sze has created a field of small sculptures especially for the space, each acts as a discrete model serving as their own temporary site marking a precisely composed moment. The sculptures, conceived as models of chance occurrences, highlight the tension between the effort to map, dissect and understand information, and the inevitable measure of futility in that effort.

Info: Victoria Miro Gallery, 16 Wharf Road, London, Duration: 30/1-28/3/15 & 14 St George Street, London, Duration:30/1-14/3/15, Days & Hours for both Galleries: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, www.victoria-miro.com