Sarah Sze
“In the age of the image, a painting is a sculpture.” An epigram Sarah Sze has marshaled to alternately bridge and juxtapose the experiences of nature and the digital screen, this knotty idea has animated her return to two-dimensional paintings. Rather than merely propose images of conventional things in the world, the artist has selected to examine their underlying forces—that is to say, the gravity and electromagnetism that determine their connections. Brightly colored, highly detailed, and above all dynamic, her paintings constitute image fields capable of containing myriad dichotomies, both old and new, which invariably coexist and coalesce in our present universe of image saturation.
Finger Fade (2020), for instance, is at once anthropomorphically and electronically digital. A scaffold-like construction that includes collaged and textural elements, the painting presents a multicolored blowup of the fingerprint of a human index finger. Done in a standard portrait format, the painted panel’s portal-like shape suggests both a digital touch screen of the most recent vintage and prehistory’s earliest mark-making, as seen in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira.
— CVF, USFCAM
Artist Sarah Sze.
About Sarah Sze
(Boston, Massachusetts, 1969)
She lives and works in New York.
Sarah Sze's work attempts to navigate and model the ceaseless proliferation of information and objects in contemporary life. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, video, and installation, Sze investigates how objects and images accrue value, and explores how objects and images ascribe meaning to the places and times we inhabit. Sarah Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. She has exhibited in museums worldwide, and her works are held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Fondation Cartier, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles. Sze's work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2000), The Carnegie International (1999), and several international Biennials, including Berlin (1998), Guangzhou (2015), Liverpool (2008), Lyon (2009), Sao Paulo (2002), and Venice (1999, 2013, and 2015). In 2020-2021 she will open a solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Pais, and a permanent sculpture for Strong King Art Center, NY. Sze has also created public works for the High Line and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, as well as recently completing a major permanent commission for LaGuardia Airport. Sarah Sze received her BFA from Yale University (1991) and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1997).
Artist website: sarahsze.com