With just 13 pieces – 11 art objects and two video installations – artist Sarah Sze’s new showcase at Gagosian Beverly Hills packs a punch into a relatively pared-back show. The paintings themselves are substantial – as large as 8ft by 16ft – and their intricacy compels lengthy gazes. Furthermore, the artist has impeccably arranged the space, conjuring an impactful and holistic experience from start to finish. “I’m always interested in talking with architecture and planning out how you can have an experience that unravels over time,” Sze told me via video interview.
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.
“I wanted there to be just enough so that you’re constantly reading it as a landscape, but you’re still having to put it together,” Sze said. “The goal is to get to a place where the work is talking back to you.”
In creating works that feel as though they are constantly in flux and constantly forcing viewers to reorient, 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.
“I feel like we’ve become so preoccupied with images outside of our eyes. How do we place ourselves in a world that constantly feels like it’s shifting all the time, when it’s not very obvious if information is even true or not?” Sze pondered. “With 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.”
Chromatically cohesive, the six paintings are awash in the colors of dusk and dawn – ultramarines, lavenders, pastel yellows and icy blues – 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.
“I want there to be this experience where you are teetering all the time – you’re disoriented, and then you orient yourself and then you’re disoriented again,” said Sze. “A work of art is finished when everything teeters. I want this idea of the perfect tension, where everything is on a tightrope.”
For her video installation Sleepers – one of two featured in the show – 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’s 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. “I had a near drowning experience,” Sze recalled, “and 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.”
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’s like to be a mother, of watching time slip away as one’s 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. “There’s a kind of real intimacy and tenderness when you see someone else asleep,” said Sze. “Their vulnerability and your own inability to engage in what they’re engaged with. That idea of being there and being completely in a world that you can’t enter.”
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 – Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey – 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’s hooves leave the ground when it gallops, and Marey, among other things, showed how cats manage to always land on their feet. “Muybridge 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,” Sze said. “I think it’s a really interesting idea that art can be a tool for sharpening the way we see the world.”
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. “There was a lot of pleasure in making the work,” she said. “I 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.”
Sze hopes that Feel Free will help audiences tap into what is going on inside of their own brains, helping them explore the treasure trove of memories that each person holds. “I think paintings are super important right now because they are vehicles to see things in our own heads,” she said.
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. “That 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,” Sze said. “Hopefully that idea is being activated.”