Sarah Sze: De nuit en jour / Night into Day: Afterimage

Description

On the twentieth anniversary of her first solo show at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, American sculptor Sarah Sze presents two new sculptural installations in the gallery spaces of Jean Nouvel's iconic building. Commissioned by the Fondation Cartier, these works explore how the proliferation of images - printed in magazines, gleaned from the Web, intercepted from outer space - fundamentally changes our relation to physical objects, memories, and time. On the occasion of the exhibition, the Fondation Cartier is publishing this richly illustrated catalogue, which includes sketches by the artists and exhibition views, retracing the creation of these sculptures. An essay by philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour, a conversation between Sarah Sze and Jean Nouvel, and a text by the exhibition curator offers a deeper understanding of these two works as well as of the creative process of the artist and the references that are omnipresent in her work.

Born in 1969 in Boston, Sarah Sze gleans objects and images from worlds both physical and digital, collaging them into complex multimedia works that shift scale between microscopic observation and macroscopic perspective on the infinite. Including proliferating media such as sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation, her body of work grapples with matters of entropy and temporality, and addresses the precarious nature of materiality. Sze has held numerous solo exhibitions worldwide and represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Bruno Latour is a French philosopher and sociologist. Jean Nouvel is a distinguished French architect. Leanne Sacramone is an exhibition curator at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain.

Astonishing and somewhat perplexing visions ... A meditation on what life has been like for millions of us in 2020: a world broken into fragments that we're still trying to piece together.--Andrew Dickson "The Guardian" Expansive, dizzying, serious but sometimes funny, fractured but propulsive, and explosive with ideas.--Nick Compton "Wallpaper*" Sze transforms the minutia of daily life--objects like bottle caps, string, color photographs, electric fans, fake rocks and live plants, along with paintings, videos and projections--into alternative worlds that careen between the micro and macrocosmic, creating fantastical environments.--Eleanor Heartney "Art Press" Sze's two installations--"Twice Twilight", a planetarium staged in darkness, and "Tracing Fallen Sky", a pool-like structure under a swinging pendulum--examine shifts in time and space. Indeed, both works, collectively called 'Night Into Day', were envisioned and predominantly made during quarantine, intending to reflect the thought patterns many faced during months in lockdown.--Barry Samaha "Harper's Bazaar" With two monumental assemblages, the American sculptor probes how an over-proliferation of images changes our relationships with objects, time, and memory.--Ryan Waddups "Surface" Sarah Sze has a gift for making cosmic subjects seem down to earth.--Andrea K. Scott "New Yorker"