Sarah Sze (; born 1969) is a contemporary artist known for sculpture and installation works that employ everyday objects to create multimedia landscapes. Sze lives and works in New York City and is a professor of visual arts at Columbia University.
Sze draws from Modernist traditions of the found object, to build large scale installations. She uses everyday items like string, Q-tips, photographs, and wire to create complex constellations whose forms change with the viewer's interaction. The effect of this is to "challenge the very material of sculpture, the very constitution of sculpture, as a solid form that has to do with finite geometric constitutions, shapes, and content."
Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. She has exhibited in museums worldwide, and her works are held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Fondation Cartier, Paris; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles. Sze's work has been featured in The Whitney Biennial (2000), the Carnegie International (1999) and several international biennials, including Berlin (1998), Guangzhou (2015), Liverpool (2008), Lyon (2009), São Paulo (2002), and Venice (1999, 2013, and 2015). Sze has also created public works for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the High Line in New York. Sze was born in Boston, Massachusetts and lives and works in New York.
On January 1, 2017, a permanent installation commissioned by MTA Arts & Design of drawings by Sze on ceramic tiles opened in the 96th Street subway station on the new Second Avenue Subway line in New York City.
Art market
Sze is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York and Victoria Miro Gallery in London.
Personal life
Sze lives in New York City with her husband, Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies who teaches medicine at Columbia, and their two daughters.
Notable exhibitions
2016 – "Sarah Sze," The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
2015 – "Sarah Sze," Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, NY
2015 – "All The Worlds Futures", 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, curated by Okwui Enwezor
2015 – "Sarah Sze", Victoria Miro Gallery, London, UK
