Sarah Sze


Sarah Sze is a contemporary artist known for sculpture and installation works that employ everyday objects to create multimedia landscapes. Sze's work explores the role of technology and information in contemporary life utilizing everyday materials. Drawing from Modernist traditions, Sze's work often represents objects caught in suspension. Sze lives and works in New York City and is a professor of visual arts at Columbia University.

Early life and education

Sze was born in Boston in 1969. Her father was an architect. Sze attributes her approach to seeing the world to growing up around models and plans and to regular discussions of buildings and cities. She received a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from New York's School of Visual Arts in 1997.

Career

Sze draws from Modernist traditions of the found object, to build large scale installations. She uses everyday items like string, Q-tips, photographs, and wire to create complex constellations whose forms change with the viewer's interaction. The effect of this is to "challenge the very material of sculpture, the very constitution of sculpture, as a solid form that has to do with finite geometric constitutions, shapes, and content." When selecting materials, Sze focuses on the exploration of value acquisition–what value the object holds and how it is acquired. In an interview with curator Okwui Enwezor, Sze explained that during her conceptualization process, she will "choreograph the experience to create an ebb and flow of information thinking about how people approach, slow down, stop, perceive ."
Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. Her work has been featured in The Whitney Biennial, the Carnegie International and several international biennials, including Berlin, Guangzhou, Liverpool, Lyon, São Paulo, and Venice.
Sze has also created public artworks for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Walker Art Center, and the High Line in New York.
On January 1, 2017, a permanent installation commissioned by MTA Arts & Design of drawings by Sze on ceramic tiles opened in the 96th Street subway station on the new Second Avenue Subway line in New York City. Sze unveiled Shorter than the Day, a permanent installation, in LaGuardia Airport in 2020.
Sze is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Victoria Miro Gallery. and Gagosian Gallery.

Influences

Sze's work is influenced, in part, by her admiration for Cubists, Russian Constructivists, and Futurists. Particularly, their attempt to "depict the speed and intensity of the moment and the impossibility of its stillness."

Personal life

Sze lives in New York City with her husband Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies who teaches medicine at Columbia University, and their two daughters.
Sarah’s great-grandfather, who had a waist-length queue, was the first Chinese student to go to Cornell University. He became China’s minister to Britain and then ambassador to the United States. Her father, Chia-Ming Sze, was born in Shanghai; his family fled China when he was four, and resettled in the United States. He became an architect and married Judy Mossman, an Anglo-Scottish-Irish schoolteacher. Sarah and David, her older brother, grew up in Boston. Sarah went to Milton Academy as a day student and graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1991. Throughout her childhood, she was constantly drawing—at the dinner table, on the train, wherever she was.
Her grandfather is Szeming Sze who was the initiator of World Health Organization.

Notable exhibitions