Flicker, 2020, is a new wall-based work that continues Sarah Sze’s decades-long exploration of the ways in which the proliferation of images – printed in magazines and newspapers, gleaned from the Web and television, intercepted from outer space, and ultimately imprinted on our conscious and unconscious selves – fundamentally changes our relationship to physical objects, memories and time. Celebrated for her intricate multimedia installations, in recent years Sze has returned to painting, in which she first trained. In works such as Flicker, the picture plane becomes a site of dynamic experimentation, where ideas in their conception are mapped out and traces of multiple image-making mediums are variously reframed and refracted, collapsed and unified. These are generative and highly recursive works, in which layers of paint, ink, paper, pencil, prints and other materials are engaged in a measured call and response so that, for example, the torn edge of collage might be seen echoed in pristine trompe-l’oeil brushwork, while paint itself might, at points, conjure the digital disturbance of computer processing or the flickering movement of film, and at others exist purely as a record of its own materiality.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1969, Sarah Sze lives and works in New York. Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. Centrifuge, a major commission by Haus der Kunst, Munich, was installed in the museum’s Middle Hall in 2018. The artist has exhibited in museums worldwide, and her works are held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions, including Tate, London; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; MUDAM, Luxembourg; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Sze has also created public works for the High Line in New York and the city’s Second Avenue Subway Station. Shorter than the Day, Sze’s ambitious installation for LaGuardia Airport’s new Terminal B, is permanently on view.  Sarah Sze: Night into Day opened recently at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. Featuring two new works it is an immersive exhibition (24 October 2020–7 March 2021) in dialogue with Jean Nouvel’s building.