SARAH SZE

Throughout the exhibition in Beverly Hills, Sze redefines collage as a spatial and temporal language that moves across mediums in flux, transforming the image itself into a sculptural material. In a process of continual fragmentation and reconstruction, these works explore how our senses, emotions, and memories are conditioned by today’s media-saturated world.

Organized across three interconnected galleries, Feel Free presents spatial systems that unfold according to their own internal logic. Each room embodies a different relationship to light, material, and time, in which metamorphosis of imagery through multiple states becomes the subject—as images move across constructed forms, fall into shadow, splinter into color, and return as quiet traces. Many begin as interior visions—impressions held in memory that are recognized only when they reemerge. By linking the images on view to those we carry in our mind’s eye, Sze makes perception itself a material of her work.

The exhibition’s two sculptural video installations create distinct but interrelated environments for image making. Sleepers (2024) develops across a constellation of suspended surfaces in a sequence of interwoven chapters. Projected light moves from plane to plane, appearing and dissolving to generate an internal rhythm of sight and sound. In Once in a Lifetime (2026), projections fracture through shadow and reflection as they encounter sculptural forms that organize and interrupt a fluctuating field of light. Together, the installations reveal images as unstable spatial events shaped by structure, surface, and changing conditions of light.

The third gallery features Sze’s newest paintings. Incorporating oil and acrylic paint, photographic fragments, digital imagery, collage, and objects, these layered surfaces further the artist’s experimentation with representation, form, and dimension—where glimpses of observed and remembered worlds converge within compositions of modulated scale and tempo.

The recursive structures of the exhibition mirror how imagery traverses contemporary life and memory—returning in flashes, mutating with context, and persisting across shifting physical states. Sze’s installations and paintings together form a continuum in which an understated intimacy emerges. As the distance between artist, artwork, and viewer diminishes, the shared condition of being shaped by images becomes fleetingly visible.

Following the exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present Sarah Sze: Forever is Composed of Nows,__opening November 21, 2026. Transforming the museum’s Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium, this ambitious site-specific, multisensory commission creates a shifting landscape where light, sound, and movement intertwine.