Sarah Sze
by Sarah Sze, Linda Norden, Arthur C. Danto
Category: Art

Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze's distinctive sculptures have riveted and challenged the contemporary art world. Integrating everyday materials into dynamic, complex installations, Sze's work inhabits the boundary between art and daily life while eloquently finessing the lines between painting, sculpture, and architecture. Whether clustered on ledges, tucked in corners, or stretched across museums, Sze's sculptures transform the locations they conquer and disorient one's sense of time and place, shifting in scale from the humble to the monumental, the manufactured to the natural, and the mundane to the extraordinary. Often structural marvels appearing to teeter on the brink of collapse, the gravity-defying constructions struggle to soar beyond the boundaries of the spaces that contain them. Sze's iconic compositions have been commissioned for numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world. Sarah Sze is the first monograph to span the course of Sze's prolific career and include sculptures, site-specific installations, and works on paper. Art critic Arthur Danto's introductory essay discusses the nature of Sze's originality and its connections with poetry and meaning. In her essay, writer and curator Linda Norden addresses the underlying tension in Sze's work between its individual elements and its larger forms, and examines the question of how matter takes on value, both temporally and spatially.