Sarah Sze (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series) - Softcover

Buchloh, Benjamin H D; Enwezor, Okwui; Hoptman, Laura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0714870463 ISBN 13: 9780714870465

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 2016

Synopsis

The first substantial monograph on an artist whose sculptures capture the proliferation of information and objects in contemporary life.

Sarah Sze (b. Boston, 1969, lives and works in New York) has developed a sculptural aesthetic that transforms space through radical shifts in scale, colonizing peripheral spaces, engaging with the history of a building, and altering the viewer's perception and experience of architecture through large, site-specific interventions. Known for her unexpected and carefully arranged combinations of materials, from cotton buds and tea bags to water bottles and ladders, light bulbs and electric fans, Sze has presented ephemeral installations that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings and burrow into the ground. Her work exists at the intersection of sculpture, drawing and architecture where her formal interest in light, air and movement is coupled with an intuitive understanding of colour and texture.

Like the scientific instruments of measurement they often reference, Sze's sculptures attempt to quantify and organize the universe, ascribing a fragile, personal system of order. Within her practice, sculpture becomes both a device for organizing and dismantling information and a mechanism to locate and dislocate oneself in time and space.

Sze received a BA from Yale University in Connecticut in 1991 and an MFA from New York's School of Visual Arts in 1997. She is represented by Tanya Bonakdar in New York and Victoria Miro in London. In 2013 she represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2003 and of the AICA Award for Best Project in a Public Space in 2012.

Her work is well represented in important private and public collections worldwide, including those of New York's Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, along with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa, Japan, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

About this title

About the Author

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is Professor of Modern Art in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and an editor of October magazine. He divides his time between New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Okwui Enwezor is a curator, art critic, editor and writer. Since 2011 he has been the Director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. In 2015 he directed the 56th Venice Biennale.

Laura Hoptman is a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Review

"Sarah Sze's impossibly intricate installation pieces are wonders of balance and imagination" —Christian Viveros Faune, City A.M.

"Sarah Sze's extraordinary work is a rare convergence of beauty, passion, energy, and intelligence." —Pauline Willis, Director, American Federation of the Arts

"Sarah Sze's sculptures are models of how we think – or don't or don't often think enough – about time and space. In that sense they are everything a sculpture can and should hope to be." —Nick Compton, Wallpaper

"Sze's work routinely refuses the viewer the safety of a single viewpoint. Sculpture that's insistently on the brink, it seesaws constantly from art to life, and back again." —Christian Viveros Faune, Village Voice

About this edition

• Publisher: Phaidon Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0714870463
• ISBN 13: 9780714870465
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160