Tag: Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze is an American artist widely recognized for challenging the boundaries of painting, installation, and architecture. Sze’s sculptural practice ranges from slight gestures discovered in hidden spaces to expansive installations that scale walls and colonize architectures.

Sze’s work explores the role of technology and information in contemporary life utilizing everyday materials. Drawing from Modernist traditions, Sze’s work often represents objects caught in suspension. Sze lives and works in New York City and is a professor of visual arts at Columbia University.

Born in Boston, Sze earned a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1997. While still in graduate school, she challenged the very nature of sculpture, at MoMA PS1 in New York, by burrowing into the walls of the building, creating sculptural portals and crafting ecosystems that radically transformed the host architecture. A year later, for her first solo institutional exhibition, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she presented Many a Slip (1999), an immersive installation sprawling through several rooms in which flickering projections were scattered among complex assemblages of everyday objects. This marked Sze’s first foray into video, which has since become a central medium of her installations. Citing the Russian Constructivist notion of the “kiosk” as a key inspiration, she conceived subsequent installations as portable stations for the interchange of images and the exchange of information. Sze’s work was included in the 48th Biennale di Venezia and the Carnegie International in 1999; the Whitney Biennial in 2000; and the Bienal de São Paulo in 2002. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003.