Sarah Sze ...: About Sarah Sze

About Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1969. Sze builds her installations and intricate sculptures from the minutiae of everyday life, imbuing mundane materials, marks, and processes with surprising significance. Combining domestic detritus and office supplies into fantastical miniatures, she builds her works, fractal-like, on an architectural scale. Often incorporating electric lights and fans, water systems, and houseplants, Sze’s installations balance whimsy with ecological themes of interconnectivity and sustainability. Whether adapting to a venue or altering the urban fabric, Sze’s patchwork compositions seem to mirror the improvisational quality of cities, labor, and everyday life. On the edge between life and art, her work is alive with a mutable quality—as if anything could happen, or not. Sarah Sze received a BA from Yale University (1991) and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1997). She has received many awards, including a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2005); John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2003); Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (1999); and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award (1997). Major exhibitions of her work have appeared at the Asia Society Museum, New York (2011); 10th Biennale de Lyon (2010); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (2009); Malmö Konsthall (2006); Whitney Museum of Amerian Art (2003); Walker Art Center (2002); São Paulo Bienal (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1999), and Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (1999), the Carnegie International (1999), and the 48th Venice Biennale (1999). Sarah Sze lives and works in New York City.

Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze's signature sculptural aesthetic has become one of the most iconic in contemporary art today. Working in a manner that could be called space-specific, Sze uses assorted everyday things to compose installations and sculptures that dwell in gallery corners, hang on walls, and sometimes even burrow underground or creep out of windows. Each work is made of hundreds of objects, pieced together with precision and formal ingenuity. Her constructions resemble miniature galaxies, artificial microcosms, or visionary civilizations in which order and chaos keep one another in check.

Sze's Public Art Fund commission Corner Plot unites the artist's delicate and dazzling assemblages with her ongoing interest in architecture and the urban environment. The sculpture resembles the white brick apartment that stands on the opposite corner across Fifth Avenue. Although it is in pristine condition, the structure seems to have sunk into the ground or perhaps slowly surfaced like an archeological relic. Through the building's windows, viewers can see an interior vista extending several feet below street level. This underground cavity seems to be abandoned, yet a handful of clues remain as to the nature of the space: there is an illuminated light fixture on the ceiling, light switches and electrical outlets on the wall, as well as bookshelves and a ladder. The majority of the room is filled by a variety of objects that have colonized it from within: a tree, socks, an alarm clock, water bottles, vitamins, a reading lamp, salt, a scale, a wrench, an orchid, and many other things. This swirling, miniature ecosystem appears to descend into a vortex or grow up from the depths like barnacles or crystals, as if the objects have succumbed to some sort of natural process or force.

Source: "Public Art Fund", November 2006 "," http://www.pbs.org."