Sarah Sze | GAGOSIAN GALLERY
NEW WORKS
13 oct 2018 – 26 jan 2019
In the age of the image, a painting is a sculpture. A sculpture is a marker in time.
—Sarah Sze
This is the first gallery exhibition in Italy by American artist Sarah Sze, following her participation in the Biennale di Venezia in 2013 (Triple Point, US Pavilion) and 2015.
Sarah 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.Sarah Sze has been credited with changing the very potential of sculpture. Working from an inexhaustible supply of quotidian materials, Sarah Sze 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 Sarah Sze’s Timekeeper series begun in 2015, transforms the oval gallery of Gagosian Rome into a lanterna magica, an immersive environment that is part sculpture, part 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, Sarah 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.
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 (, traveled to Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, in ); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (–); th Biennale di Venezia (); th Guangzhou Triennial, China (); Sarah Sze: Timekeeper, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (, traveled to Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark, in ); ARoS Triennial, Aarhus, Denmark (); and Centrifuge, Haus der Kunst, Munich (). Sze was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in , and a Radcliffe Fellowship in , 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 (–); Still Life with Landscape, Ekebergparken, Oslo (); and Blueprint for a Landscape, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, th Street station of the nd Avenue subway line, New York ().
GAGOSIAN
Via Francesco Crispi, 16
Rome
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