Interiority is a concept that multimedia artist Sarah Sze has been fixating on lately.
“So much of what we experience is actually interior,” Sze said in a recent video interview. “We’ve become so exterior focused. We’re so outward looking.”
At a time when it’s all too easy to consume a never-ending stream of social media images, the celebrated New York-based artist is more interested in scrolling through the images stored inside her own mind.
Her new show, “Feel Free,” champions the mind’s eye, in all its random, fragmented glory. It brings a collection of new paintings and two immersive video installations to Gagosian Beverly Hills.
Sze is known for her unconventional sculptures and large-scale paintings, which she’s shown in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, LACMA and the U.S. Pavilion at multiple Venice Biennales. In 2023, she left her mark on both the inside halls and the exterior walls of the Guggenheim Museum, and her public sculptures have transformed a grassy hillside as well as a pine grove and an international airport.
Sarah Sze’s Gagosian Beverly Hills show “Feel Free” is meant to feel intimate.
(Ariana Drehsler/For The Times)
At the Gagosian show, Sze leaned into the intimate and fragile, while continuing her signature experimental streak.
In one of her newest pieces, “Once in a Lifetime” — part sculpture, part video display — precarious clusters of bric-a-brac form a mechanical marvel that appears to defy gravity.
A stack of small projectors is cradled inside of a fantastical tower fashioned out of crisscrossed tripods, metal poles and ladders festooned with an assemblage of toothpick structures, empty cardboard containers that once held crayons and Lactaid, dangling prisms, arts & crafts scraps, and paper cut-outs of deer and wolves (figures that appear throughout the show).
The bare gallery walls surrounding the monument flash with rotating projections of construction sites where buildings are being erected and demolished, clouds drifting across tranquil blue skies, and city lights twinkling then slowly dissolving into floating fractals. The Dadaist piece is every bit as off-kilter and fascinating as the Talking Heads song that inspired its title.
“Once in a Lifetime” is part video display and part sculpture, made of tripods, toothpicks, lights, cardboard boxes and projectors that flicker images on the gallery walls. (Ariana Drehsler/For The Times)
“The most important thing about my show is that I hope it’s really challenging and exciting and gives young artists license to do what they want to do,” Sze said.
“When they come in and say, ‘Wait … I didn’t know you could put up toothpicks going to the ceiling and throw a video through it and make it into a movie. I didn’t know you could put a pile of things on the floor in front of a painting.’ It’s like, ‘OK! Yes, you can!’”
Meanwhile, large canvases in the main gallery space are covered with oil and acrylic paints and printed backdrops dotted with an assortment of images: sleeping female figures; hands pointing, drawing and flashing peace signs; the sun at different stages of setting; birds in flight; wolves and deer in their natural habitats. Layered on top are paint splotches and streaks, as well as taped-on paper and vellum, blurring and obscuring the collage of figures underneath.
“Escape Artist,” left, “White Night” and “Feel Free,” are new paintings by Sarah Sze at Gagosian Beverly Hills.
(Ariana Drehsler/For The Times)
“One of the things I was thinking about was when we dream and then we wake up, there’s this extreme, fleeting moment where you’re trying to grasp the dream,” Sze said. “The dream is disappearing at the same time, and you’re trying to re-create those images.”
She went on to describe “a landscape turning into a different landscape, and then you’re falling, and then you’re turning, and then someone appears that you didn’t expect to be there.”
In addition to this spree of the subconscious, the artist offers glimpses of her creative process. Pooled on the ground below the canvases (and even dangling from the rafters above) is an assortment of the tools of her trade — from tape measures to paint scrapers. Brushes, pens and pencils lie next to the ripped cuffs of cotton workshirts, and drops of blue and white paint are splattered on the floor, extending the artwork beyond the wall.
Sze spent five days installing the show inside the gallery and the commonplace supplies incorporated into the pieces are what she dubbed “remnants of the workspace.”
“Sleepers,” a video installation Sze debuted in 2024, plays with the light entering through a gallery window. Images of sleeping heads and forest animals play amid the sound of cello notes and deep breathing.
(Ariana Drehsler/For The Times)
If the paintings act as snapshots of dreamscapes, “Sleepers,” the video installation she debuted in 2024, sets those images in motion. Dozens of hand-torn paper fragments connected by rows of string become miniature projection screens, each flashing with images of the same sleeping heads, busy hands and forest animals. These are interspersed with flashes of TV static and ocean waves, all set to the sounds of humming, disjointed cello notes and deep breathing.
“Feel Free” by Sarah Sze
When: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., through Feb. 28
Where: Gagosian Beverly Hills, 456 N. Camden Drive in Beverly Hills
Directly in the center, a slender vertical window — part of the gallery’s architecture — illuminates the otherwise darkened room with a pillar of natural light, further contributing to the ethereal nature of the piece.
Viewed at the right angle, the piece resembles a giant eye. It’s the perfect visual cue to get visitors thinking about what we see and how we see it.