PARIS.- Gagosian opened an exhibition of new paintings and an immersive installation by Sarah Sze. Pictures at an Exhibition marks the artist’s return to Paris after her first show at the gallery there in 2020, which coincided with her solo exhibition Night into Day at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.
Following its debut at the inaugural Thailand Biennale, codirected by Rirkrit Tiravanija in Chiang Rai this past year, Sze’s immersive video installation Pictures at an Exhibition (2023) occupies the gallery’s entire ground floor. Expanding from the center of the space, a multitude of paper screens are animated with images, video, and light, forming a porous, illuminated core, like a room-sized kaleidoscope. Chromatic projections spill around their edges to cast remnants of light on the floors and walls of the central gallery and surrounding spaces, flickering across viewers as they move around the work.
Pictures at an Exhibition shares its title with a celebrated piano suite composed by Modest Mussorgsky in 1874, whose movements interpret a sequence of paintings. Likewise, Sze’s installation bridges diverse modes of media, perception, and sensorial experience. Juxtaposing natural imagery and abstract forms, the dynamic work is structured through spatial and temporal montage. Rapid, orchestrated transitions between fragments and whole images coalesce into constellations of larger cohesive forms. A collection of fleeting moments, from the personal to the universal, the momentous to the mundane, flashes by, held in an exquisite equilibrium. The cycles of constantly transforming imagery are both spectacular and ephemeral, foregrounding the nature of digital representation and the shifts in perception, memory, and desire accompanying its ubiquitous presence.
The installation is presented alongside a new series of paintings in which Sze applies her signature visual language throughout the building, including the gallery’s interstitial spaces, an exterior-facing vitrine on street level, and the first floor. Working through a generative process, Sze combines acrylic and oil with layers of photographic prints that are collaged to the works’ surfaces. Incorporating accumulated fragments of images into disorienting gestural compositions, Sze develops new modes of abstraction in her paintings that collapse distinctions between digital and analog, tactile and immaterial, and physical and imagined.
Sarah Sze was born in 1969 in Boston and lives and works in New York. Collections include Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Tate, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and M+, Hong Kong. Exhibitions include Triple Point, United States Pavilion, 55th Biennale di Venezia (2013, traveled to Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, in 2014); Timekeeper, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2016, traveled to Copenhagen Contemporary, in 2017); Centrifuge, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017–18); Night into Day, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2020–21); Timelapse, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023); and Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2024). Sze participated in the 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015); the ARoS Triennial, Aarhus, Denmark (2017); and the Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai (2023–24). Recent permanent commissions include Blueprint for a Landscape, Second Avenue Subway, 96th Street Station, New York (2017); Shorter than the Day, LaGuardia Airport, New York (2020); and Fallen Sky, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2021).
