A number of sculptures, including a work viewable by visitors as they move through the waterside garden, relate to Sze’s landmark installation Fallen Sky, a permanent, site-specific work nestled into a hillside at Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York. Playing with the scale and landscape of the exterior and interior spaces, these mark a trail, first appearing outside the gallery in the garden, then inside the building. The different sizes of the sculptures, meanwhile, invite us to consider how scale changes our physical orientation to an object and to its surrounding space, encouraging thoughts of fragility and flux, positive and negative space, material permanence, entropy and ephemerality.

Like Fallen Sky, which was created partly through a process of erosion, the sculptures are inspired by ancient architecture and the language of ruins, merging with their surroundings and appearing as if they were both integral to the landscape and at a point of disintegration. To create the works, a simple pendulum hung from the studio ceiling was employed to create a perfect bowl in clay. The ‘fast’ movement conveyed in this sculptural gesture is starkly juxtaposed with the more glacial time and movement conveyed in the sculptural language of the sides of the work: in the drying process the clay split and cracked until barely holding together.

The completed works in stainless steel with reflective mirror-polished surfaces catch an ever-changing stream of passing light and shadow across their multiple individual elements. Sze has referred to the dynamic nature of these works as ‘filmic’ in their ability to reveal ‘how the landscape behaves’, capturing fragments of the surrounding environment and co-opting them, in effect, into a fragmented film in real time. These works operate at a distinct register, collaging and camouflaging into any environment. At the same time, the idea of the fragment – of many pieces forming a whole – relates to Sze’s use of collage in the paintings on view, and her evolving process where ‘the sculptures generate the paintings, and the paintings generate the sculptures.’

About the artist

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. The artist has exhibited in museums worldwide, and her works are held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions, including Tate, UK; 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, the city’s Second Avenue Subway Station, and the new LaGuardia Airport.

This summer (opened 26 June 2021) Sarah Sze: Fallen Sky, a permanent, site-specific sculpture and exhibition featuring the panoramic work Fifth Season, opened at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY. Other current institutional exhibitions include On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale, a group exhibition (10 September 2021–9 January 2022) at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Sze’s installation Seamless, 1999, is on view at Tate Modern until October 2022. In 2023, Sze’s work will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.