SARAH SZE

Early Years

Born in Boston in 1969, Sarah Sze studied at Yale University before earning her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She currently lives and works in New York City. Sze’s training in painting and her longstanding engagement with architecture deeply informs her multidisciplinary approach, which encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, print, video, and performance.

Sze rose to prominence in the late 1990s, gaining early recognition with her inclusion in the 1999 Carnegie International and her first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1999. Her education in both liberal arts and visual art set the foundation for her investigative approach to materiality and systems of knowledge.

Artworks

Sarah Sze’s contemporary art practice explores how objects and images circulate in the digital age, constructing sculptural works that resemble constellations of information. Her artworks are defined by an extraordinary level of detail and a poetic logic that reveals the invisible structures that shape our experience of the world.

Found Materials and Fragile Architectures

Sze’s early installation Everything That Rises Must Converge (1999) marked a turning point in her exploration of sculptural form. In this intricate assemblage, she employed everyday objects—string, paper, tape measures, fans, and plastic containers—to build a suspended, sprawling ecosystem within the gallery space. The work exemplifies her interest in the fragile balance of systems and the aesthetic potential of the mundane. Each item is positioned with meticulous care, creating an architecture of improvisation and control. This early work set the tone for her ongoing interest in mapping invisible forces through the accumulation of ephemeral materials.

‘Timekeeper’ Series (from 2015)

Initiated in the mid-2010s, Sze’s Timekeeper series introduced video projection as a central material within her sculptural vocabulary. These immersive, room-sized installations incorporate moving images, clocks, mirrors, and mechanical parts to orchestrate an experience of time as layered, fragmented, and elusive. Projected footage spills across sculptural assemblages, which include rotating arms, light sources, and printed matter. In these works, the digital image is both a subject and a surface. Sze’s Timekeeper installations challenge the viewer to reconsider how we perceive time’s passage, evoking a sense of simultaneity and disorientation that reflects contemporary information overload.

Venice Biennale and Monumentality: Triple Point (2013)

In 2013, Sarah Sze represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale with Triple Point, a site-specific installation that occupied all five galleries of the US Pavilion. Named after the thermodynamic state where a substance can exist in equilibrium between gas, liquid, and solid, Triple Point explored the instability of systems in flux. The installation featured a meticulous constellation of objects: lamps, rulers, wires, plastic containers, and notebooks, each acting as a node within a shifting visual network. The work invoked themes of navigation and scientific inquiry, positioning the artist as a mapmaker within an uncertain universe.

Recent Installations: Shorter than the Day and Timelapse (2020–2023)

From 2020 onwards, Sze has expanded her practice into monumental public and architectural installations. Shorter than the Day (2020), installed at LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B, features a vast suspended sphere made from hundreds of photographic images tracing the arc of a day, serving as a meditation on temporality, travel, and the fragmentation of experience. As she noted in a 2015 interview during installation of her exhibition at Victoria Miro, she has long been interested in how “smaller units add up to a whole” and how we “model space and time” with objects—concerns that resurface, at a different scale, in these later works. In 2023, she transformed the disused ticket hall of Peckham Rye Station in London into Metronome, a cinematic, light-filled environment in which moving images, sound, and torn paper explore how the images that saturate our world relate to bodies, memory, and transit.

Public Commissions

• Blueprint for a Landscape, Second Avenue Subway, 96th Street Station, New York (2017)
• Shorter than the Day, LaGuardia Airport, New York (2020)

Awards and Accolades

• Meraki Artist Awards, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2025)
• Elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, as an Honorary Royal Academician (2024)
• Asia Arts Games Change Award (2022)
• Represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013)
• American Academy of Arts and Letters (2011)
• MacArthur Fellowship (2003)

Exhibitions

Sarah Sze has been the subject of both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• Sarah Sze, Gagosian, Hong Kong (first solo exhibition in Asia) (2025)
• Sarah Sze: Timelapse, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023)
• Sarah Sze. Night into Day, Fondation Cartier, Paris, France (2020-2021)
• Images in Debris. Sarah Sze, MoCA Toronto, Toronto (2020)
• Sarah Sze, Crypta Balbi, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome (2018)
• Sarah Sze: Centrifuge, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2017-2018)
• Sarah Sze: Triple Point (Planetarium), Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York (2014)
• Sarah Sze, Musée d’Art modern et d’Art contemporain, Nice (2011)

Group Exhibitions

• Off the Wall, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2021)
• Papillon, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021)
• Making the Met 1870-2020, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2020)
• Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, A Beautiful Elsewhere, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2018)
• The Times, The Flag Art Foundation, New York (2017)
• Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Venice Biennale, Venice (2015)
• International 08: Made Up, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2008)
• Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2000)

Website and Instagram

Sarah Sze’s website can be found here.

Critical Reception

Sarah Sze’s work has been widely featured in leading art publications such as Ocula, The Guardian, and The New York Times.

In conversation with Ocula Magazine, Sze stated: ‘What it is to be human in this moment is so surreal, and so extreme, that the work that could come out of it—even if we don’t understand what we’re making as artists now—could be such an interesting and important historical document.’

Sarah Sze FAQs

Ocula | 2025