Sarah Sze at Victoria Mirò

This is Sarah Sze (b. 1968, Boston) third solo show with Victoria Mirò and her first presentation in Europe since representing the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

In the Wharf Road galleries the exhibition will comprise of three installations – one on each floor – that the artist has conceived as a series of different experiments that explore the construction and measurement of space, mass, time, and volume through the use of materials. Each one turns the viewer’s sense of scale, gravity, and information on its head. Common objects like rocks, newspapers, and furniture mutate from something known, to something foreign, fragile, newly composed, and entirely transformed.

For the Mayfair gallery Sze has created a field of small sculptures especially for the space, each acts as a discrete model serving as their own temporary site marking a precisely composed moment. The sculptures, conceived as models of chance occurrences, highlight the tension between the effort to map, dissect and understand information, and the inevitable measure of futility in that effort.

Sze’s body of work addresses questions about the fragility of human behavior, the desire to model complex systems, and the impermanence of value and memory. To explore these ideas, she utilizes myriad everyday objects in her installations. Presented as traces of human behavior, these items, released from their commonplace duty, acquire a certain vitality and ambition. Assemblages of these objects become systems, capable of renewal, aspiration and decay, or repositories of memory and value. Her work ascribes a new understanding of purpose while questioning the process of imbuing any material — hand-made or industrially produced — with worth.

Wharf Road Exhibition dates: 30 Jan – 28 Mar