Career
Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze's signature sculptural aesthetic has presented ephemeral installations that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings and burrow into the ground. The artist creates immense, yet intricate site-specific works which manipulate every space—be that a gallery, domestic interior or street corner—and profoundly affects the way it is viewed. Sze's practice exists at the intersection of sculpture, painting and architecture where her formal interest in light, air and movement is coupled with an intuitive understanding of colour and texture. Sze utilises a myriad of everyday objects in her installations from cotton buds and tea bags to water bottles and ladders, light bulbs and electric fans. Presented as leftovers or traces of human behaviour, these items, released from their commonplace duty possess a certain vitality and ambition within the work. Her careful consideration of every shift in scale between the humble and the monumental, the throwaway and the precious, the incidental and the essential solicits a new experience of space, disorienting and reorienting the viewer at every turn.
Her intricate works, each of which she constructs by hand, consist of unexpected and carefully arranged combinations of materials. Sze transforms these everyday objects into gravity-defying works in horizontal and tower-like formations that zigzag into the heights of gallery spaces. In 2011-2012, her work Still Life With Landscape (Model for a Habitat) was installed on the High Line in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood and received the AICA Award for Best Project in a Public Space. In 2016, a permanent installation of drawings by Sze on ceramic tiles will open in the 96th Street Subway Station on the new Second Avenue Subway line in New York City.
Sze is a 2003 recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program "genius grant".
In 2013, she will represent the United States at the 55th International Venice Biennale.
Sze is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York and Victoria Miro Gallery in London.
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