Victoria Miro is pleased to announce an exhibition by American artist Sarah Sze. The installation – Sze’s first with the gallery – spans both floors. The work on the ground floor is new to the gallery, while the piece on the second floor incorporates a reconfiguration of a recent work – Tilting Planet – initially shown at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden.
Since the late 1990s Sarah Sze’s signature sculptural aesthetic has presented ephemeral installations that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings and burrow into the ground. Creating immense, yet intricate site-specific work the artist utilises myriads of everyday objects in her installations – cotton buds and tea bags; water bottles and ladders; light bulbs and electric fans. Each piece is subject to Sze’s careful consideration of every shift in scale between the humble and the monumental, the throwaway and the precious, the incidental and the essential.
In this new body of work Sarah Sze organizes space as if it is a remnant of human behaviour discovered by accident. The formal construction of the pound-store objects as rafts, nests, tents, and escape routes mimics the necessities that emerge from various survival mechanisms and states of refuge. Like an entire ecosystem, these individual objects participate in larger systems of interaction performing a role beyond their commonplace function.
Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969 and currently lives and works in New York. She completed studies at Yale University, Connecticut and at the School of Visual Art in New York. She has exhibited internationally, with solo projects at the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, (2006), Whitney Museum, New York, (2003) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002), and Fondation Cartier in Paris (1999). Sze has also participated in the Berlin Biennale (1998); Venice Biennale, (1999); Carnegie International, (1999-2000) and the Whitney Biennial (2000). Sze’s work was last seen in the UK in the Serpentine exhibition, State of Play, 2004 and she had a solo exhibition at the ICA in 1998. Sarah Sze was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2003.
