Through painting, architecture and installation, artist Sarah Sze’s work attempts to comprehend the endless information that we encounter in contemporary life. She examines how this mass production affects notions of value, and how these objects ascribe meaning to the places and times in which we live. To convey this, everyday objects such as living plants, handmade sculptures, found items and photographs appear within her work, emerging as encyclopaedic landscapes which stretch across gallery spaces and often alter or intervene with the architecture.
Sze’s work holds its own order that she has personally prescribed, in an attempt to dismantle and reorganise the cumulative evidence of contemporary life which she has collected. In her first major galley show to take place in the USA since representing the country in the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), the artist will present new work ranging from large scale installation to small sculptural pieces. This work will challenge the stability of sculpture, and therefore will convey uncertainty about a world overwhelmed by fragments of information. Tools such as pendulums, dioramas and miniature models explore absence and entropy, attempting to map space and time – even if their processes are only fully understood by Sze. Some pieces will expand upon aspects of Sze’s installation in the 56th Venice Biennale, Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures, in which her open-air field of remnants evoked a ruined garden, suggesting its history within a fictional, deteriorating world.
Sarah Sze, 10 September – 17 October, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 W 21st St #1, New York, NY 10011, United States; www.tanyabonakdargallery.com.
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Credits
1. Sarah Sze, The Last Garden (Landscape of Events Suspended Indefinitely), 2015. Installation in the Giardino delle Vergini La Biennale di Venezia 56th International Art Exhibition 2015, All the World’s Futures. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Victoria Miro, London.
