Sarah Sze:
A Survey of Editioned Works: 2008-2013

Exhibition View

Made alongside her various large-scale installations (Foundation Cartier, Walker Art Center, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Whitney Museum, Venice Biennale and Asia Society, among many others), Sze has continually engaged with making editioned works. From straightforward single prints and portfolios, to cut paper, to three dimensional objects, Sze has continuously and ingeniously created work with similar subject matter as to her large-scale installations.

The materials of Sze’s work are a mixture of found, scavenged and purchased. The arrangements of these materials vary from spectrums to arrays to semi-taxonomies. Legibility of purpose, system and choice are grey zones within the work that provide opportunities for exploration, discovery and questioning. Scale of experience and representation are equally tweaked.

In the works in this exhibition, all of these themes are covered. In “2”, a portfolio of 6 silkscreens take one through a seemingly legible eye test of some variety (most likely seen as a color-blindness test) but a viewer quickly recognizes that the ‘test’ is both too easy (form over color in several instances) and too difficult (all blackish circles with no way to differentiate the number “2” except through comparison to the other elements in the portfolio). Color, form and memory are all given equal weight – a beautiful notion with which to view the entire show.

Each of the works in the show take imagery and techniques that Sze has used and self-appropriates, alters and reconfigure to make new works that not only engage the issues of color, form and memory/referentiality/history, but also Sze’s own creative history.

Blue Giardini”, made from a commercially available pasta box, incorporates silhouettes of imagey taken from Sze’s installations, along with the reference to pasta and Venetian blue, as well as more abstracted senses of the boats – all directly related to her project last summer in American Pavilion for the Venice Biennale.