Sarah Sze

Through complex constellations of objects and a proliferation of images, Sarah Sze expands upon the never-ending stream of visual narratives that we negotiate daily, from magazines and newspapers, television and iPhones, to cyberspace and outer space. Her practice evokes the generative and recursive process of image-making in a world where consumption and production are more interdependent, where the beginning of one idea is the ending of another—and where sculpture gives rise to images, and images to sculpture.

The artist embeds her nuanced sculptural language into the material surfaces of painting and into the digital realm—collapsing distinctions between two, three and four dimensions. Her practice fundamentally alters our sense of time, place, and memory by transforming our experiences of the physical world around us.

Through painting, sculpture, video and installations, Sze employs a constellation of everyday materials in her work, ranging from found objects and photographs to handmade sculptures and living plants, creating encyclopedic and accumulative landscapes that penetrate walls and stretch across museums. Her work often takes on architectures, transforming space through radical shifts of scale or colonizing overlooked and peripheral spaces. Like the scientific instruments of measurement they often reference, Sze's work attempts to quantify and organize the universe, ascribing a fragile, personal system of order. The works become both a device for organizing and dismantling information and a mechanism to locate and dislocate oneself in time and space.

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Born in Boston in 1969, Sze presently lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Yale University in Connecticut in 1991 and an MFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1997. She is a 2003 MacArthur Fellow.

In 2013, Sze represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale with a solo pavilion presentation entitled Triple Point. Other important solo exhibitions include Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem (2023); Storm King Art Center, New York (2021); Fondation Cartier Pour L'art Contemporain, Paris (2021); MOCA Toronto (2020); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017-2018); Rose Art Mususeum at Bradis University (2016); Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (2014), Asia Society in New York (2011-12), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle, UK (2009), Malmo Konsthall in Sweden (2006), Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2003), Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2002), Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2002), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1999), Foundation Cartier in Paris (1999), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (1998). She has conceived major public commissions at New York City’s High Line Park (2011-12), the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York City, organized by the Public Art Fund (2006), Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (2004); New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 2nd Avenue subway line, 96th street station, New York (2017); La Guardia Airport (2020); Storm King Art Center, New York (2021).

Sze’s sculptures, installations and works on paper have also been exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Haus Der Kunst in Munch, Copenhagen Contemporary in Copenhagen, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, as part of the 1999 Carnegie International.

Her work is well represented in important private and public collections worldwide, including those of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, and Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, along with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa, Japan, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, Tate Collection, London, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Fondation Louis Vuitton, France, among others.