Sarah Sze: modelling time and space. By Louisa Buck.
New York artist Sarah Sze takes over Victoria Miro's London spaces with a thoughtful narrative on the passing of time.
The intricate, labour-intensive installations of Sarah Sze frequently use the most banal and insignificant everyday objects to express the biggest and grandest ideas. And her current show which simultaneously occupies all Victoria Miro’s East and West End spaces is no exception.
“I was thinking about how we model space and time. How we model it with objects and how we locate ourselves within a larger narrative of time and space,” she says. Simultaneously epic and intimate, and operating somewhere between sculpture, drawing, scientific models and fantasy machines, Sze’s orchestrations of newspapers, toothpicks, cotton buds, office furniture and table lamps – to name just a few of her myriad materials – have won the 45-year-old New York artist international acclaim, a slew of global shows, a 2003 McArthur Fellowship (AKA ‘Genius Grant’) and the American pavilion at the last Venice Biennale.
Now, in her first European show since Venice, Sze has filled all the Miro galleries with a number of new pieces each of which – although unmistakably carrying her trademark traits – has a very distinct appearance and character. Each reflects her ongoing preoccupation with using material stuff to express a precise moment or experience and to represent the passing of time.
