Sarah Sze exposition. Gagosian Gallery Rome
In the age of the image, a painting is a sculpture. A sculpture is a marker in time.
Sarah Sze
Gagosian presents new works by American artist Sarah Sze. This is Sze’s first gallery exhibition in Italy, following her participation in the Biennale di Venezia in (Triple Point, US Pavilion) and 2015.
Sze’s art utilizes genres as generative frameworks, uniting intricate networks of objects and images across multiple dimensions and mediums, from sculpture to painting, drawing, printmaking, and video installation. She has been credited with changing the very potential of sculpture. Working from an inexhaustible supply of quotidian materials, she assesses the texture and metabolism of everything she touches, then works to preserve, alter, or extend it. Likewise, images culled from countless primary and secondary sources migrate from the screen to manifest on all manner of physical supports—or as light itself. A video installation, the latest of Sze’s Timekeeper series begun in , transforms the oval gallery of Gagosian Rome into a lanterna magica, an immersive environment that is part sculpture, part © 2018 Gagosian. All rights reserved. cinema. In these studies of the image in motion, at once expansive and intimate, time, place, distance, and the construction of memory are engaged through a mesmerizing flux of projected images, both personal and found. A sort of Plato’s Cave, the new work confronts the viewer from simultaneous points of view: moving pictures of people, animals, scenes, and abstractions unfold, flickering and orbiting randomly like thought, or life itself.
In an in-situ gesture that links the darkened video gallery with the adjoining room of new panel paintings, Sze materializes light as a spill of paint applied directly to the stone floor. In the paintings, her nuanced sculptural language adapts to the conditions of the flat support. In delicate yet bold layers of paint, ink, paper, prints, and objects, the three dimensions of bricolage are parsed into the two dimensions of collage. Here, color draws its substantive energies as much from the innate content of found images as from paint and ink. Fields of static, blots, and cosmic vortices emerge out of archival material drawn from the studio and its daily workings in endless visual permutations that collide and overlap in an abundance of surface detail.
In November, Sze will add Split Stone (7:34) (2018) to the exhibition. The first in a series of planned outdoor stone sculptures, Split Stone (7:34) is a natural boulder split open like a geode. Each of the two revealed cuts has a sunset sky embedded in its flat surface, alluding to both the images perceptible in gongshi (scholar’s rocks) and the heavenly subjects of Renaissance paintings.
Sarah Sze Bio
Sarah Sze was born in Boston, and lives and works in New York. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. Recent institutional exhibitions include Triple Point, United States Pavilion, th Biennale di Venezia (2013 traveled to Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, in 2014); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2013–14); th Biennale di Venezia (2015); th Guangzhou Triennial, China (2015); Sarah Sze: Timekeeper, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, traveled to Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark); ARoS Triennial, Aarhus, Denmark (2017); and Centrifuge, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017).
Sze was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship Award and a Radcliffe Fellowship, and she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters earlier this year. Public commissions include Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat), the High Line, New York (2011–12); Still Life with Landscape, Ekebergparken, Oslo (2013); and Blueprint for a Landscape, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, th Street station of the nd Avenue subway line, New York. From November, Sze’s large-scale installation Seamless (1999) will be on view at Tate Modern, London. Sze’s sculpture Split Stone (7:34) (2018) will be on view in the historic Crypta Balbi in Rome, from November .
