NYAB Event - Sarah Sze Exhibition

Sarah Sze Exhibition

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

This event has ended.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presents its first solo exhibition of new work by Sarah Sze. Among the most influential and esteemed artists of her generation, Sze has exhibited regularly in numerous major international museums and biennials since the late 90s. This presentation marks the artist's first gallery exhibition in New York in over five years. The show will feature a wide range of newly conceived installations, exhibiting the full dynamic vocabulary of the artist's work, and filling the entire two-floor exhibition space of the gallery.

Sarah Sze recontextualizes objects that normally exist within the periphery of our everyday lives, exploiting our ability to recognize them while highlighting their intimate details and reflecting our behavior in relationship to them. Using meticulously crafted and colorful compositions, the artist causes the viewer's perspective to undulate between microcosmic and macrocosmic worlds. Time, movement and navigation are key to the experience of Sze's work and the exhibition as a whole. There is no single viewing point, as reality and meaning shifts with each step, creating a sequence of visual experiences. Sze elicits internal movement as well; reflecting and projecting light, positioning oscillating table fans upon strings or levers. Blurring the boundary between art and life, outside and interior worlds, Sze creates atmospheres, suggesting both familiarity and alienation, in which objects share our space while also occupying another dimension.

In one of the main installations, downstairs, Sarah Sze presents a monumental, visual encyclopedia of hundreds of objects, many delicately composed, which together seem to shift and spin against gravity to create a sense of disorientation for the viewer. Industrial shelves, working lamps, milk cartons, and other varied detritus from our everyday lives tilt almost to their tipping point, as the entire floor plan appears to shift physics. Sze's piece evokes the past and the future as both an archaeological ruin and a site of new construction. The work is light and airy, yet structured, and is experienced differently depending from which point the viewer approaches. Walking up to and inside the work, the visitor feels a sensation of time and space slowing down, followed by reorientation, as Sze plays with gravity and the illusion of speed through the long, horizontal lines. Objects seem to hover in suspended animation, with angles creating slight confusion and vertigo, and a sense that the structure might be falling apart. At once the piece feels much more fragile, and the lines between architecture and ornament, the real and the false, are blurred.

In another work, water in a bowl is gently reflected onto a small piece of paper, and then further projected around the room. Animated light and shadows dance on all four walls, like a silent, abstract film originating from a tiny, artificial world containing order and chaos. Sze's constructions seem to hold clues to the secrets of the universe, as well as function as abandoned remnants or evidence of some unknown event, or both.

Upstairs in one of the second floor gallery spaces, a large, spherical composition evokes the concept of a portable planetarium. Mixing both architectural structures and scientific models, the artist challenges the hubris of our human ambition to constantly imagine and map out the universe. Following transitions from one image or object to the next, the visitor reads an infinite flowchart of interconnectivity, constructing an entirely unique visual narrative with each experience.

Living and working in New York, Sarah Sze has a degree in painting from Yale University, 1991 and an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1997.