With just 13 pieces \u2013 11 art objects and two video installations \u2013 artist Sarah Sze\u2019s new showcase at Gagosian Beverly Hills packs a punch into a relatively pared back show. The paintings themselves are substantial \u2013 as large as 8ft by 16 ft \u2013 and their intricacy compels lengthy gazes. Furthermore, the artist has impeccably arranged the space, conjuring an impactful and holistic experience from start to finish. \u201cI\u2019m always interested in talking with architecture and planning out how you can have an experience that unravels over time,\u201d Sze told me via video interview.<\/p>\n
Long known as a masterful practitioner of collage, Sze here draws on landscapes as a general means of organizing the space on her canvas, but then radically alters them to offer experiences that at once feel both subtly familiar and utterly fresh.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted there to be just enough so that you\u2019re constantly reading it as a landscape, but you\u2019re still having to put it together,\u201d Sze said. \u201cThe goal is to get to a place where the work is talking back to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
In creating works that feel as though they are constantly in flux and constantly forcing viewers to re-orient, Sze was inspired by contemporary society, where the proliferation of images and video recorded on smartphones, as well as the exclusive spread of AI deepfakes and misinformation promulgated by powerful actors, has led to a world that feels fundamentally unmoored.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like we\u2019ve become so preoccupied with images outside of our eyes. How do we place ourselves in a world that constantly feels like it\u2019s shifting all the time, when it\u2019s not very obvious if information is even true or not?\u201d Sze pondered. \u201cWith these images I want you to be actively trying to orient yourself within them, to actively be in that state of trying to find an orientation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sarah Sze \u2013 Escape Artist, 2026. Photograph: Photo: Maris Hutchinson, courtesy the artist and Gagosian<\/p>\n
Chromatically cohesive, the six paintings are awash in the colors of dusk and dawn \u2013 ultramarines, lavenders, pastel yellows, and icy blues \u2013 spattered with bursts of light that call to mind globular clusters of stars. They also drop in subtle touches, like a pair of hands spreading out a deck of cards as though inviting the viewer to take one, or a shadowy fox that seems to be dashing across the painting. Broad, jagged vertical bands shoot through these works, while skinny lines burst and skitter at all angles. The result feel like a contradiction, paintings that are constantly vibrating with a feeling of movement yet restful and contained in their wholeness.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want there to be this experience where you are teetering all the time \u2013 you\u2019re disoriented, and then you orient yourself and then you\u2019re disoriented again,\u201d said Sze. \u201cA work of art is finished when everything teeters. I want this idea of the perfect tension, where everything is on a tightrope.\u201d<\/p>\n
For her video installation Sleepers \u2013 one of two featured in the show \u2013 Sze drew on two very different personal experiences: the escalating terror of a moment when she nearly drowned, and the contemplative intimacy of watching her daughters sleep. The rising human breath that grounds Sleepers is Sze\u2019s own breathing, which she recorded while running, taking the idea from a powerful memory of her own gasping as she fought for her very life. \u201cI had a near drowning experience,\u201d Sze recalled, \u201cand I realized I was in trouble when I could hear myself gasping. The idea that your body can talk to you is important for that piece.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sarah Sze \u2013 Sleepers, 2024. Photograph: Photo: Maris Hutchinson, courtesy the artist and Gagosian<\/p>\n
Visually, Sleepers is based around video recordings that Sze made of her two daughters while they slept. In part the installation is about what it\u2019s like to be a mother, of watching time slip away as one\u2019s daughters speedrun the accelerated experience that is childhood, and trying to grab on to those fleeting moments of calm and closeness that are a part of raising children. \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of real intimacy and tenderness when you see someone else asleep,\u201d said Sze. \u201cTheir vulnerability and your own inability to engage in what they\u2019re engaged with. That idea of being there and being completely in a world that you can\u2019t enter.\u201d<\/p>\n
In trying to change how we look at our image-saturated world with Feel Free, Sze was inspired by two major figures of the 19th-century \u2013 Eadweard Muybridge and \u00c9tienne-Jules Marey \u2013 for how their studies of animal movement changed the way people saw the world. Among other things, Muybridge settled the debate about whether all four of a horse\u2019s hooves leave the ground when it gallops, and Marey, among other things, showed how cats manage to always land on their feet. \u201cMuybridge and Marey were really interesting to me, they were arguably the first film-makers. They used images to prove something physical in the world, to see the world in a way that we might not notice otherwise,\u201d Sze said. \u201cI think it\u2019s a really interesting idea that art can be a tool for sharpening the way we see the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sarah Sze \u2013 Feel Free, 2026, installation. Photograph: Maris Hutchinson\/Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy Gagosian<\/p>\n
Beyond wanting to challenge audiences to look differently at the vast array of images that are now a part of everyday life, Sze also took great pleasure in making these pieces. Contrasting these paintings with others that she has really struggled to bring together, this body of work put her into more of a flow state where she was able to act on her intuition and sink into the creative process. \u201cThere was a lot of pleasure in making the work,\u201d she said. \u201cI really enjoyed making them, and I think that joy probably comes out in them. I did things that were strange for me, and one thing just led to the next and I just kind of trusted it. I wanted the videos and the paintings to just really meld.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sze hopes that Feel Free will help audiences tap into what is going on in inside of their own brains, helping them explore the treasure trove of memories that each person holds. \u201cI think paintings are super important right now because they are vehicles to see things in our own heads,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
In their continual deconstruction and reconstruction, these paintings give insights into how our very view of the world is in fact a creative process, one that is in part informed by the many images we are constantly taking in. \u201cThat becomes a subject of the show, how an artwork can be not only a way to see the world but also an active way of seeing how we construct images,\u201d Sze said. \u201cHopefully that idea is being activated.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With just 13 pieces \u2013 11 art objects and two video installations \u2013 artist Sarah Sze\u2019s new showcase…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265450,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-265449","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}