LONDON.- Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art will present Tilting Planet, an exhibition by American artist Sarah Sze. The work will be on show from Friday 10 April until Monday 31 August in the Level 4 gallery, the largest exhibition space at Baltic.

For nearly two decades Sarah Sze’s distinctive sculptures have riveted and challenged the viewer. Taking common disposable objects as her media, she transforms such items as water bottles, drawing pins, paper, salt, string, lamps, matchsticks and wire into delicate works that tower precariously in gravity-defying structures. These spectacular constructions can be large, complex and intricate in scale and composition, and suggest that the tiniest change in balance or temperature might incite a profound shift in their order. In Tilting Planet, the sculptures appear as though remnants from a disappeared civilisation, with each posing surreptitiously as potential mechanisms for survival: tents, rafts, lean-to shelters, escape routes.

Over time Sze has built an expansive vocabulary using everyday materials, and her precisely choreographed structures defamiliarise our preconceived ideas of these objects, lending them a newfound vitality. The sculptures seem to mould themselves into and through spaces and spread ivy-like across and up surfaces.

The cavernous space that houses Tilting Planet at BALTIC accentuates the simultaneous macro and micro-level experiences of the sculptures. With its pillars, high ceiling and mezzanine vantage, the Level 4 gallery will inspire a new configuration of the work. Operating almost as an independent ecosystem, the sculptures that comprise Tilting Planet will become a singular topographical terrain, a unique landscape emerging from components of the everyday.

Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969 and currently lives and works in New York . She completed her studies at Yale University , Connecticut and at the School of Visual Arts , New York . She has exhibited internationally, with solo projects at the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2006), Whitney Museum, New York (2003) Walker Art Center , Minneapolis (2002), and Foundation Cartier in Paris (1999). Sze has also participated in the Whitney Biennial (2000), Carnegie International (1999-2000), Venice Biennale (1999); and the Berlin Biennale (1998).

Sze’s work was last seen in the UK at the Liverpool Biennial (2008) and Victoria Miro Gallery, London (2007). In 2004 she participated in the group show State of Play at the Serpentine Gallery and had a solo exhibition at the ICA , London in 1998.

Sarah Sze was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2003.

Tilting Planet was initially shown during 2006 / 2007 at Malmö Konsthall , Sweden followed by the Victoria Miro Gallery, London in 2007.