Basel | ArtRegion: Basel - Oberrhein

Gagosian Basel

Sarah Sze: New Works

20. September – 13. November 2021

Art Basel Week Hours (10-16 June 2024): Mon 10-20 | Tue-Sun 10-19 ★Mon 18-20

Sculpture is everything physical outside of the mind’s eye. Painting is a sculpture. The digital is a sculpture. An image is a sculpture. They are sculpted with the senses: eyes, ears, mouths, fingers—all of them. The senses give form to these things, which we collect in order to build our imagination, memory, dreams—the nonphysical. Sculpture is a lens, a portal, not a medium.
—Sarah Sze

Gagosian is pleased to present Sarah Sze’s first-ever exhibition in Switzerland. This is her third exhibition with the gallery, coinciding with Art Basel 2021. Sze’s first large-scale outdoor video work will be a key feature of this year’s Art Basel Parcours.

A peerless bricoleur credited with “changing the potential of sculpture,” Sze gleans from the physical and digital worlds, building artworks of staggering intricacy and diversity that invite minute observation while evoking a macroscopic perspective on the infinite. Activating the borders that separate mediums, she reflects on the overload of virtual experience and the confusion that it creates with our real experience in physical space.

In paintings, sculptures, and video installations, Sze grapples with the ideas and matter of time and entropy, underscoring the precious and precarious nature of materiality. The works on view transform the galleries into a unified, image-laden expanse, allowing viewers to grasp the formal and conceptual breadth of Sze’s practice. Cast sculptures Wider than the Sky and Pound for Pound (both from the 2020–21 series Fallen Sky) are directly related to Sze’s landmark installation that was inaugurated at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York this summer. Inspired by ancient architecture and the language of ruins, they catch passing light and shadow, appearing as if already disintegrated.