Born in Boston, Massachusetts (b. 1969)

Sarah Sze

Crisscross, 2021

Oil, acrylic, acrylic polymer, and ink on composite aluminum panel, with wood support. © Sarah Sze; courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
Photo by Daniel Spizzirri.

Sarah Sze is acclaimed for her complex multimedia installations, paintings, drawings, and videos that address temporality, entropy, and materiality. In 2013 she represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale with her exhibition Triple Point in the United States Pavilion, which she approached as a site of observation and experimentation. In recent years, Sze has returned to painting, the medium in which she first trained. Sze conceived of the Crisscross paintings in pairs, revealing two versions of a related image. Across the surfaces, images appear to repeat, mirror, and flip back and forth, impressing upon the viewer a sense of continual cross-pollination, meticulously arranged yet evoking the chaotic static of a shattered screen or a kaleidoscopic computer glitch.

Sarah Sze in her New York City studio with an in-progress painting. Photo by Chase Middleton.

“I’m more interested in how defining the idea of sculpture leads to breaking it down. I’m more interested in the idea that film can be a sculpture, a drawing can be a sculpture, music can be a sculpture.”

—Sarah Sze