Spanning 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 comprises 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.
A new series of silkscreen prints also mark a singular moment in time – 1 January 2014 – and are based on newspapers gathered from around the world on that date, with all images replaced by depictions of the midnight sky. Several works from the series are installed at both the Mayfair and Wharf Road galleries in a sequence that follows the rotation of the earth as one year turned into the next.
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 reconceived and reconfigured especially for the London exhibition.
Sze's body of work addresses questions about the fragility of human behavior, 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 behavior, 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.
We are delighted to announce a new publication for the exhibition Sarah Sze: Afterimage, featuring a text by the artist and an essay by Jarrett Earnest.
Filmed in January 2015 on the occasion of Sarah Sze's exhibition across Victoria Miro, London's three gallery spaces.