Sarah Sze is one of the most promising young American artists. As a student, she was already a figure to be reckoned with on the international scene, in a marginal way, breaking with the Conceptualism and Minimalism which reigned from the 1960 to the 1980s, and, using large site-specific installations made of recycled objects, she developed a more sensitive genre, at once expressive and poetic, imbued with realism, and suited to dreams. A graduate of, among other places, Yale University in 1991, it was after a trip to India that she introduced household objects into her work. In 1996, for the SoHo Annual, she presented an installation made up of several hundred tiny sculptures made of toilet paper, which harbingered the artist’s principal concerns to come, namely the use of objects which are at once utilitarian, impersonal, devoid of aesthetic value, and resulting from mass production. Devised like an inventory strictly arranged on metal shelves and on the floor, this insurmountable work, very extended in space but microscopic, invited the spectator to move about and lean over it. Her choice of materials broadened very fast: bottle stoppers, matches, buttons, a ruler, wires, fishing lines, remnants of fabrics, clips, lights, plants, a stool, a bucket, coils of coloured metal, wooden rods, and ladders. Her installations grew larger and left the floor to come down from the ceiling and traverse walls (Seemless, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 1999), emerging from the ground like small archaeological sites bounded by fences (Powers of Ten, Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard, New York, 2001), reproducing the circulation of migratory flows and cocking a snook at the laws of gravity (Corner Plot, Doris C. Friedman Place, New York, 2006), and taking the form of a nest akin to an observatory (Portable Planetarium, Lyon Biennale, 2009). In 1999, S. Sze took part in the Venice Biennale. She was a resident at the Calder Studio in Saché in 2003. Many institutions have held solo exhibitions of her work. S. Sze also excels in the practice of drawing and engraving, which, together with sculpture, she taught at Colombia University in 2009.
Pauline GUÉLAUD
See this illustrated text on the website of the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
