ART CITIES: Paris-Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze’s immersive works challenge the static nature of art. Her work questions the value society places on images and objects and how they both ascribe meaning to the places and times we inhabit. Widely recognized for expanding the boundaries between painting, sculpture, video and installation, Sze’s work ranges from intimate paintings that collapse time and space to expansive installations that create complex constellations of materials and public works that scale walls and colonize architectures.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Following its debut at the inaugural Thailand Biennale, codirected by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gridthiya Gaweewong in Chiang Rai this past year, Sarah Sze’s immersive video installation “Pictures at an Exhibition” (2023) occupies Gagosian’s Gallery entire ground floor in Paris. Expanding from the center of the space, a multitude of paper screens are animated with images, video, and light, forming a porous, illuminated core, like a room-sized kaleidoscope. Chromatic projections spill around their edges to cast remnants of light on the floors and walls of the central gallery and surrounding spaces, flickering across viewers as they move around the work. “Pictures at an Exhibition” shares its title with a celebrated piano suite composed by Modest Mussorgsky in 1874, whose movements interpret a sequence of paintings, but also with the live album by English progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer, released in November 1971that features the group’s rock adaptation of the piano suite, performed at Newcastle City Hall on 26 March 1971. Likewise, Sze’s installation bridges diverse modes of media, perception, and sensorial experience. Juxtaposing natural imagery and abstract forms, the dynamic work is structured through spatial and temporal montage. Rapid, orchestrated transitions between fragments and whole images coalesce into constellations of larger cohesive forms. A collection of fleeting moments, from the personal to the universal, the momentous to the mundane, flashes by, held in an exquisite equilibrium. The cycles of constantly transforming imagery are both spectacular and ephemeral, foregrounding the nature of digital representation and the shifts in perception, memory, and desire accompanying its ubiquitous presence. In Sze’s latest work, an atmospheric construction of cascading lines spans from floor to ceiling to create a web of image fragments. This mirage-like apparition – mirrors a process of growth in action, like that of a live experiment in a state of formation and flux. Its torn paper is held in suspension and animated by a film of moving images that illuminates its porous core, creating a vast magic lantern. The evolving sequence of images from the film spills over the sculpture and onto the surrounding architecture, transitioning back and forth between constellations of individual images and grouping of pixels that resolve larger cohesive imagery. A collection of moments; from the personal to the universal, the momentous to the mundane all held in a precarious equilibrium as they form a kind of memory palace. This generative work questions and challenges the tenuous threshold between the digital and the analog, and the tactile and the imagined. Permeable and intertwined and you’re constantly shifting between what you’re seeing and what it’s becoming. The installation is presented alongside a new series of paintings in which Sze applies her signature visual language throughout the building, including the gallery’s interstitial spaces, an exterior-facing vitrine on street level, and the first floor. Working through a generative process, Sze combines acrylic and oil with layers of photographic prints that are collaged to the works’ surfaces. Incorporating accumulated fragments of images into disorienting gestural compositions, Sze develops new modes of abstraction in her paintings that collapse distinctions between digital and analog, tactile and immaterial, and physical and imagined.

Photo: Sarah Sze, Pictures at an Exhibition, 2024, installation view, © Sarah Sze, Photo: Andrea Rossetti, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, France, Duration: 25/6-28/9/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-18:30, https://gagosian.com/