Victoria Miro presents a triple exhibition by Sarah Sze, which will span all three spaces. This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery and her first presentation in Europe since representing the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
In the Wharf Road galleries the exhibition will comprise of three installations – one on each floor – that the artist has conceived as a series of different experiments that explore the construction and measurement of space, mass, time, and volume through the use of materials. Each one turns the viewer’s sense of scale, gravity, and information on its head. Common objects like rocks, newspapers, and furniture mutate from something known, to something foreign, fragile, newly composed, and entirely transformed.
For the Mayfair gallery Sze has created a field of small sculptures especially for the space, each acts as a discrete model serving as their own temporary site marking a precisely composed moment. The sculptures, conceived as models of chance occurrences, highlight the tension between the effort to map, dissect and understand information, and the inevitable measure of futility in that effort.
Sarah Sze was artist in residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2013 – 2014. The installations presented in the Wharf Road galleries, made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, have been re-conceived and reconfigured especially for the London exhibition.
Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969 and lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. A MacArthur Fellow Award-winner, she is known for her large-scale installations that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings, burrow into the ground, and stretch across museums. Sze studied painting and architecture, and intersected these disciplines to arrive at sculpture, where her formal interest in light, air and movement is coupled with an intuitive understanding of composition, colour and texture.
Sze’s body of work addresses questions about the fragility of human behaviour, the desire to model complex systems, and the impermanence of value and memory. To explore these ideas, she utilizes myriad everyday objects in her installations. Presented as traces of human behaviour, these items, released from their commonplace duty, acquire a certain vitality and ambition. Assemblages of these objects become systems, capable of renewal, aspiration and decay, or repositories of memory and value. Her work ascribes a new understanding of purpose while questioning the process of imbuing any material – hand-made or industrially produced – with worth.
Sarah Sze – Victoria Miro (Wharf Road) Victoria Miro (George Street) from 30 January 2015 to 14 March 2015