Sarah Sze

Victoria Miro presents Sarah Sze’s first exhibition at Victoria Miro Venice. This exhibition, the artist’s sixth with Victoria Miro, marks a return to Venice for Sze, who featured in the 1999 and 2015 Biennales and represented the United States with her exhibition Triple Point in the 2013 Biennale.

Two immersive environments explore how images are constructed and memories are formed. Sze takes over the gallery with a new moving-image installation and present a suite of new paintings in surroundings that bring the mise-en-scène of Sze’s New York studio to a nearby Venetian apartment, uncannily evoking a sense that the artist has just stepped away from her place of work.

Sze’s latest video work transforms the gallery with an array of ever-changing projections suspended throughout the space. Carefully composed, the projections invite the viewer to visually navigate the work, forming a personal narrative by journeying from one image to the next. Interested in shattering the singularity of an image, and in dismantling any hierarchy of visual material, Sze’s installation questions the nature of looking and underscores how images are fundamental to memory. 

On view in the salon rooms of an apartment opposite the gallery, Sze creates a total environment with a series of paintings presented within a simulation of the space in which they were made. Again considering the perception of images, Sze’s enquiry is one of orientation: how does one locate oneself in a painting, and how can a painting’s effect be one of disorientation? Compositionally complex, the works incorporate both art historical strategies and digital techniques. These are paintings that reward the act of looking: the eye is always engaged in a process of putting the paintings together and taking them apart.

A sense of discovery and indulging the pleasure of being lost rather than arriving at a destination has informed all of Sze’s oeuvre, and the experience of Venice as a place, its unique invitation to wander, is echoed within the exhibition. All of the works on view incorporate imagery – even if layered and hidden – that Sze has captured or created in the city.