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拍品专文
“For me a piece is done when it’s at this stage of teetering, where it’s not too much one thing or too much the other…” Sarah Sze (S. Sze, quoted in M. Mazria-Katz, “An Artist Who’s Been Making Work About Life and Death Since Childhood,” The New York Times Style Magazine, July 2, 2024).
Known for her expansive installations and large-scale works that incorporate ordinary, everyday objects in densely built compositions, Sarah Sze explores the precarious existence of our physical world. Pushing the limits of painting, assemblage and collage, her work is a constant balancing act of humble materials brought to monumental heights. Long Ending is a striking example of the artist’s work in two dimensions where myriad materials converge to create a delicate equilibrium that seems to be in a constant state of flux. “For me a piece is done when it’s at this stage of teetering, where it’s not too much one thing or too much the other,” the MacArthur Fellow explained in an interview with The New York Times. “I want, for example, the paintings to sit between a photograph—what a picture is—and what an oil painting can do, what acrylic can do, what a print can do. I want you to have this confusion between them. It’s always flickering. It’s fragile” (S. Sze, quoted in M. Mazria-Katz, “An Artist Who’s Been Making Work About Life and Death Since Childhood,” The New York Times Style Magazine, July 2, 2024). This confluence of various media and their uneasy truce is essential to her practice as she seeks to visualize the daily bombardment of physical and digital information that characterizes contemporary experience.
Deftly layering painting and collaged elements, Sze creates a visual vortex that both pulls the viewer into the center of the work and simultaneously spans outward in all directions. Printed and painted images jockey for dominance but neither gain the upper hand due to the artist’s keen sense of visual balance. “The randomness of all these things is actually really precise,” she has noted somewhat paradoxically about her process. (S. Sze, quoted R. Pogrebin, “Sarah Sze Aims for Precise Randomness in Installing Her Gallery Show,” The New York Times, Aug. 23, 2015). Intentionally straying from any ordered pattern or prescribed form, Sze's conflation of material sources and the boundaries they no longer represent eschew hierarchies of originality and traditional notions of how images are generated and persist in memory as well as the present.
Commenting upon the contemporary archive, Sze collects material for her constructions from everyday sources and arranges them in an effort to visualize the human urge to save, sort, and categorize. Employing a unique formal language that both subverts and builds on traditional forms of image-making, Sze creates multilayered compositions that pull from history and the present in equal measure. Materiality and its connection to the artistic process is important for an understanding of works such as Long Ending as the strata of paper, paint, and other materials coalesce into an uneasy illusionism. The artist's dynamic and generative body of work, spanning sculpture, painting, video, printmaking and architecture, provides infinite possibilities for the process of seeing images across time and space.
The subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Sze is also well known for representing the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale. Her groundbreaking site-specific installations offer the viewer a microcosm of our world in which the virtual and material are no longer distinguishable.
Known for her expansive installations and large-scale works that incorporate ordinary, everyday objects in densely built compositions, Sarah Sze explores the precarious existence of our physical world. Pushing the limits of painting, assemblage and collage, her work is a constant balancing act of humble materials brought to monumental heights. Long Ending is a striking example of the artist’s work in two dimensions where myriad materials converge to create a delicate equilibrium that seems to be in a constant state of flux. “For me a piece is done when it’s at this stage of teetering, where it’s not too much one thing or too much the other,” the MacArthur Fellow explained in an interview with The New York Times. “I want, for example, the paintings to sit between a photograph—what a picture is—and what an oil painting can do, what acrylic can do, what a print can do. I want you to have this confusion between them. It’s always flickering. It’s fragile” (S. Sze, quoted in M. Mazria-Katz, “An Artist Who’s Been Making Work About Life and Death Since Childhood,” The New York Times Style Magazine, July 2, 2024). This confluence of various media and their uneasy truce is essential to her practice as she seeks to visualize the daily bombardment of physical and digital information that characterizes contemporary experience.
Deftly layering painting and collaged elements, Sze creates a visual vortex that both pulls the viewer into the center of the work and simultaneously spans outward in all directions. Printed and painted images jockey for dominance but neither gain the upper hand due to the artist’s keen sense of visual balance. “The randomness of all these things is actually really precise,” she has noted somewhat paradoxically about her process. (S. Sze, quoted R. Pogrebin, “Sarah Sze Aims for Precise Randomness in Installing Her Gallery Show,” The New York Times, Aug. 23, 2015). Intentionally straying from any ordered pattern or prescribed form, Sze's conflation of material sources and the boundaries they no longer represent eschew hierarchies of originality and traditional notions of how images are generated and persist in memory as well as the present.
Commenting upon the contemporary archive, Sze collects material for her constructions from everyday sources and arranges them in an effort to visualize the human urge to save, sort, and categorize. Employing a unique formal language that both subverts and builds on traditional forms of image-making, Sze creates multilayered compositions that pull from history and the present in equal measure. Materiality and its connection to the artistic process is important for an understanding of works such as Long Ending as the strata of paper, paint, and other materials coalesce into an uneasy illusionism. The artist's dynamic and generative body of work, spanning sculpture, painting, video, printmaking and architecture, provides infinite possibilities for the process of seeing images across time and space.
The subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Sze is also well known for representing the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale. Her groundbreaking site-specific installations offer the viewer a microcosm of our world in which the virtual and material are no longer distinguishable.