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Lot Essay
“I want…the paintings to sit between a photograph—what a picture is—and what an oil painting can do, what acrylic can do, what a print can do. I want you to have this confusion between them. It’s always flickering”—Sarah Sze
(S. Sze, quoted in M. Mazria-Katz, “An Artist Who’s Been Making Work About Life and Death Since Childhood,” The New York Times Style Magazine, July 2, 2024).
Sarah Sze’s prismatic painting Flicker is emblematic of the artist’s recent practice which examines the way that images saturate our day-to-day life and shape our experience of the world. Drawing from a wide variety of sources– stock photography, photographs taken by the artist, and video stills– Sze creates layered compositions that play with color, texture, dimensionality, and perception and which fundamentally challenge our relationship to physical objects, memories, and time. Her work has been exhibited at major institutions across the United States and abroad and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the MCA Chicago, and SFMOMA, LACMA and MOCA in California. She is a 2005 MacArthur Fellow and in 2013 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, where her work was also featured in 1999 and 2015.
Swirling around a flickering flame, a vortex of images spins, pulling everything toward its core. Interspersed between abstract fragments, images of an isolated desert road stretch from the foreground into the distance, creating a vast sense of space. The torn paper has been adorned with ‘pointillist’ daubs of color that cover them in a veil of pigment. This blend of media lies at the heart of Sze’s current painting practice, “For me a piece is done when it’s at this stage of teetering, where it’s not too much one thing or too much the other,” Sze explained in an interview with The New York Times. “I want, for example, the paintings to sit between a photograph—what a picture is—and what an oil painting can do, what acrylic can do, what a print can do. I want you to have this confusion between them. It’s always flickering. It’s fragile” (S. Sze, quoted in M. Mazria-Katz, “An Artist Who’s Been Making Work About Life and Death Since Childhood,” The New York Times Style Magazine, July 2, 2024).
Well-known for her complex multi-media installations, recently the artist has made a celebrated return to the practice of painting with which she began her career, and in which she was formally trained. In works such as the excellent present example, Sze builds a site of dynamic experimentation. Layers of contrasting media are brought together and engaged in a manner that allows them to dialogue with each other, with complexity and intricacy.
The title of the work, Flicker, evokes a sense of instability, its central flame flares and falls and is always in flux. It is this live moment, in which the work seems to be at once coming together and falling apart, that characterizes Sze’s practice across media, from sculpture to painting and everything in between.
(S. Sze, quoted in M. Mazria-Katz, “An Artist Who’s Been Making Work About Life and Death Since Childhood,” The New York Times Style Magazine, July 2, 2024).
Sarah Sze’s prismatic painting Flicker is emblematic of the artist’s recent practice which examines the way that images saturate our day-to-day life and shape our experience of the world. Drawing from a wide variety of sources– stock photography, photographs taken by the artist, and video stills– Sze creates layered compositions that play with color, texture, dimensionality, and perception and which fundamentally challenge our relationship to physical objects, memories, and time. Her work has been exhibited at major institutions across the United States and abroad and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the MCA Chicago, and SFMOMA, LACMA and MOCA in California. She is a 2005 MacArthur Fellow and in 2013 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, where her work was also featured in 1999 and 2015.
Swirling around a flickering flame, a vortex of images spins, pulling everything toward its core. Interspersed between abstract fragments, images of an isolated desert road stretch from the foreground into the distance, creating a vast sense of space. The torn paper has been adorned with ‘pointillist’ daubs of color that cover them in a veil of pigment. This blend of media lies at the heart of Sze’s current painting practice, “For me a piece is done when it’s at this stage of teetering, where it’s not too much one thing or too much the other,” Sze explained in an interview with The New York Times. “I want, for example, the paintings to sit between a photograph—what a picture is—and what an oil painting can do, what acrylic can do, what a print can do. I want you to have this confusion between them. It’s always flickering. It’s fragile” (S. Sze, quoted in M. Mazria-Katz, “An Artist Who’s Been Making Work About Life and Death Since Childhood,” The New York Times Style Magazine, July 2, 2024).
Well-known for her complex multi-media installations, recently the artist has made a celebrated return to the practice of painting with which she began her career, and in which she was formally trained. In works such as the excellent present example, Sze builds a site of dynamic experimentation. Layers of contrasting media are brought together and engaged in a manner that allows them to dialogue with each other, with complexity and intricacy.
The title of the work, Flicker, evokes a sense of instability, its central flame flares and falls and is always in flux. It is this live moment, in which the work seems to be at once coming together and falling apart, that characterizes Sze’s practice across media, from sculpture to painting and everything in between.