Sarah Sze has had solo shows at major museums around the world, represented the USA at the Venice Biennale and won a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant. So she’s a big deal. But don’t go to this two-venue show expecting heavy or self-aggrandising art. In precarious-looking sculptures and installations, the fortysomething New Yorker makes light of big ideas – chiefly, how we measure time, space and make sense of our place in the universe. And she likes to keep things simple. To this end, Sze will use whatever’s to hand, including crumpled Post-It notes, cutlery, scrunchies, cotton buds, paint charts and pot plants. You’ve probably got most of the materials for a Sze artwork on your desk right now.
In fact, the first thing you see at Victoria Miro’s Old Street space is a sprawling structure of wire cubes that resembles an exploded desk. Perhaps it’s a model of a thought process: placed on, within, or suspended from this rambling, lattice-like form are pens, charts, rolls of tape and styrofoam cups. Photographs of oceans and constellations hint at distant dreaming. Closer to home, Sze was reading a copy of Time Out (our recent Art issue) during the installation of the show, so she rolled it up and folded it into the art work, too: very meta.
Upstairs, in an installation that includes copies of the New York Times placed on the floor, their photographs replaced by elemental images of sea, sky, earth, ice and fire, Sze plays brilliantly with scale. A third installation of boulders, rocks and pebbles plays similarly with mass and weight – though it takes a while to realise that most of these forms are just armatures wrapped in photographic images of stony surfaces.
In Miro’s Mayfair showroom, meanwhile, Sze presents bonsai versions of her installations – fragile tangles of wire, wood, bits and bobs that bring to mind catapults, camp fires, radio antennae and school science experiments. Wonder, beauty, nostalgia – this show’s got it all. You’ll never look at stationery in quite the same way.
Martin Coomer