An Artist Who’s Been Making Work About Life and Death Since Childhood
Sarah Sze’s studio is an encyclopedic celebration of the human experience. Nineteenth century chronophotography of galloping horses, pre-Columbian cave paintings, and a reproduction of Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656) line the white walls of her split-level New York studio, a former carriage house used by the city’s Gilded Age barons. For Sze, whose cerebral environmental works have pushed sculpture and painting into new formal and psychological realms, these pictures are part of a continuum: artifacts whose psychic power erases the years separating us from our past selves. “Art is really about having a conversation over time,” she told me during a recent visit. “You stand in front of a great artwork, and you’re speaking across generations.”
Time — how it’s recorded and remembered and ultimately how it fades — is intrinsic to Sze’s work, perhaps never more so than in “Timelapse,” her exhibition staged last year at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. For Sze, the museum became “a site to explore the idea of a public clock.” She transformed the Guggenheim’s white bays into sculptural magpie nests with pieces like “Timekeeper” (2016), a desk heaped with a cornucopia of objects: a metronome; digital clocks telling time in different parts of the world; torn archival pigment prints of postcard-perfect skies; Newton’s cradle. Stacked and mounted video projectors hurled moving images around the room — a bird in flight, rippling water, TV static. In another work, “A Certain Slant” (2023), a pendulum dangled from a ladder atop a dolly (balanced on builder’s levels) and toggled across a floor covered with white sand that had seemingly spilled from a broken hourglass.
Sze, 55 — a professor of visual art at Columbia University whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney — showed a preternatural sensitivity for sculpture’s relationship to its environment from an early age, perhaps because she grew up with an architect father. (Her mother was a schoolteacher.) At Yale, she majored in painting but also studied architecture. Her work has often been commissioned and shown in spaces like Renzo Piano’s Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s High Line in Manhattan. “I try and come to every architecture [project] like it’s a conversation with that building and there’s a kind of marriage,” she said.
In April, Sze debuted a show at Victoria Miro gallery in Venice. It’s a kind of homecoming — she lived in the Italian city for six months with her two children and husband, the oncologist and “Emperor of All Maladies” (2010) author Siddhartha Mukherjee, when she represented the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale. The show was split into two parts, with one half hanging in the main gallery and the other shown in a nearby space that Victoria Miro typically uses as an apartment. In preparation, Sze transformed large sections of her roughly 7,000-square-foot studio in New York into a life-size facsimile of the exhibition, replete with a replica view of a neighboring canal.
