Sarah Sze is a shaman. For the American artist, anything can become art. In 1999, in her first exhibition in France, at the Cartier Foundation, Everything That Rises Must Converge, she transformed ladders and a multitude of humble objects from daily life, found in hardware stores or Dime stores, into beautiful and poetic compositions - ladders, fans, metal clips, cardboard boxes, screws, brushes, etc. The Foundation’s whole ground floor was a celebration of freedom and imagination, but assembled with the obsession and “care of a miniaturist”.
Twenty years later, the artist, born in 1969, has vastly extended and enriched her palette: videos, paintings, iPhone images, photos and new objects have been added. Sarah Sze’s exhibition at the Paris Gagosian gallery, Pictures at an Exhibition, coalesces all the different facets of her work: an immersive installation occupies almost the entire ground floor of the gallery, while paintings are on the first floor.
When visitors enter the gallery, they are immersed in a multitude of small paper screens on which videos, images and light are projected and these images are reflected onto the walls and on the floor of the space. The images projected are no less real than the images on the work itself. The effect is both joyful and disorienting as one moves around the work. It’s like being bombarded by a multitude of pieces of information, surfing from one channel to the next, one image on social media to the next.
For her exhibition, Sarah Sze was inspired by Mussorgsky’s 1874 piano piece in ten movements. Originally, each movement was the depiction of a work the composer saw at an exhibition of architect and painter Viktor Hartmann.
On the upper floor, Sze is showing a series of large paintings. As she had done for her work Fifth Season at the Storm King Center, in 2020, the works are not limited by the canvas. They drip to the floor, as a way of encouraging us to feel free, to not be limited by borders, to create our own work in our imagination. “Painting is a way to expand our interior space,” she said at the Storm King Center. “The landscape of our interior is infinite.” Viewers get lost into the paintings. They are multidimensional, combining acrylic and oil painting and photography prints pasted on the surface. There are also fragments added to the work. “Sze is abolishing the distinction between digital and analog, tactile and immaterial, physical and imaginary,” explains the curator of the show. She’s encouraging us to enter a magical world.
- Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Sarah Sze. Pictures at an Exhibition. Gagosian, 4, rue de Ponthieu. Paris. Until September 28.
