Sarah Sze
Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze has developed a signature visual language that challenges the static nature of sculpture and painting. Sze draws from Modernist traditions of the found object, dismantling their authority with dynamic constellations of materials that are charged with flux, transformation, and fragility. Captured in this suspension, her immersive and intricate works question the value society places on objects and images and how objects and images ascribe meaning to the places and times we inhabit.
Coinciding with the explosion of information of the 21st century, Sze’s work simultaneously models and navigates the ceaseless proliferation of information and imagery in contemporary life. Her encyclopedic installations and paintings unfold like a series of experiments that construct intimate systems of order—precarious ecologies in which material conveys meaning and a sense of loss. In this talk, Sze discusses her artistic practice.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1969, Sze lives and works in New York. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. Sze received a B.A. from Yale University in 1991 and an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. She is currently a faculty member in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.
The artist has exhibited in museums worldwide, and her works are held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; among many others. Sze has also created public works for the High Line in New York, the city’s Second Avenue Subway Station, and the new LaGuardia Airport.
Generously sponsored by the Yale School of Art’s John and Kate Carrafiell Dean’s Resource Fund and the Yale University Art Gallery’s Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund.