Sarah Sze: The distinguished visual artist for the first time in Athens with a new solo exhibition
THE Gagosian Gallery presents new and recent works of sculpture, painting and a video installation of hers Sarah Sze. This is the first solo exhibition in Athens and her fourth at the gallery, while the Grand opening are planned for the September 8, 2022.
After Sze’s participation in Ruins and fragments at the Gagosian Athens earlier this year, the exhibition introduces many additional aspects of Sze’s varied practice, a range of sculptural propositions as well as her latest works in oil and collage. Taking full advantage of working processes, Sze presents the ephemeral and immaterial at different timescales and in variety—from light projections programmed to suggest movement and change, to sculptures made entirely of paint, optical clay, or stainless steel.
Sze gleans elements from the physical and digital worlds to create art of high complexity and diversity in two or three dimensions, inviting us into a precise observation while mobilizing associations of a macroscopic perspective on infinity. Pictorially capturing the boundaries that separate media and activating the in-between space, she comments on the overload of virtual experience as a contemporary condition and consequently suggests how we might negotiate real experience in physical space.
A few words about her work
The “Travelers with Streams and Mountains” [Ταξιδιώτες σε Ρυάκια και Όρη] (2021 ), the most recent of the videos in the series “Timekeeper” [Χρονομέτρης], is inspired by the famous painting created by Fan Kuan during the Song Dynasty, with its characteristic three-level perspective—near, middle, and far. Fleeting, disembodied video images sweep across the room, like searchlights; a pendulum swings arcing from a scaffold, in a perpetual marking of time and space, above a salt-covered arena surrounded by a ring of debris and debris that connects . processed and washed up by the sea, while microphonic sound effects underline the lifelike quality of this robotic movement.
In recent years, Sze has returned to painting, adapting the processes she offers for sculptural accumulation to the level of the image. In these highly complex and richly textured paintings, she fuses multiple approaches—some drawn from her keen interest in printmaking—into a dynamic whole. Sze applies oil and scraps of images, either screen-printed or visibly glued to the surface, in compositions frenetic but filled with subtle conceptual nuances. Freely combining photographically produced and traced images, these restless, wandering tableaux evoke the fluidity of the digital realm while retaining an aura of the analog and the handmade.
Emily Dickinson’s early modern poetry is a constant source of inspiration for Sze’s art, which embodies the moment between cohesion and dissolution. The series of sculptures “Depending on the Groove” [Ανάλογο με το Αυλάκι] (2019 ) consists of standardized pieces of raw clay, which he slices, glazes, fires, and then places in groups over torn paper pieces of sky photographed at different times of the day or night resting on low wooden supports—a composition both elemental yet as profound as Dickinson’s poem on the nature of love from which Sze’s work takes its title.
The “Wider than the sky” [Πιο Πλατύ από τον Ουρανό] (2021 ) is how the poetess once described the limitless capacity of the human brain. In the work created by Sze in 2021, a parabolic ring of perfectly polished stainless steel fragments that have been derived from an original clay mold through a digital scanning process evokes the language of ancient architecture and ruins. The sculpture captures and reflects light giving the impression that it has already decayed.
As subtly as Dickinson’s own linguistic analysis, the sculptures in the series “Wishbone” [Γιάντες] (2020) by Sze — spilled acrylic paint that has dried and hangs from thin silver chains — punctuate the exhibition.
A few words about the artist
Sarah Sze was born in Boston and lives and works in New York. Works include the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, the Tate, London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and at M+ in Hong Kong. Her exhibitions include: Triple Pointin the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2013, traveled to the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York in ), Timekeeperat the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts (2016, traveled to Copenhagen Contemporary in 2017); CentrifugalHaus der Kunst, Munich(2017-18) and Night in Day, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, in Paris (2020-21). Sze participated in the Venice Biennale (2015) and the ARoS Triennial, Aarhus, Denmark (2017). Her recent works on permanent display include: the Design for a landscapeSecond Avenue Subway, 96th Street Station, New York (2017), Sooner than the day, at New York’s LaGuardia Airport (2020 ), and Fallen skyat Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2021).
Currently, Sze is preparing a solo exhibition to be held at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2023.
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INFORMATION
Artist: Sarah Sze
Space: Gagosian Gallery
Exposure Time: From September 8 to October 20, 2022
Entrance: Free entrance