Sarah Sze

Sze artist pic.JPG

Sarah Sze’s long-standing relationship with the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies spans nearly a decade and encompasses several collaborative projects. Untitled (Day I), her first graphic work, explores the idiosyncratic architectural forms of her three-dimensional installations in a large-scale, two-dimensional print. Together Sze and the Neiman team decided that multiple layers of offset lithography and screenprint would work best to capture her imagery and achieve a sense of spatial recession. Untitled (Day 1), printed in an edition of only 10, led to the production two years later of Day and Night, a seemingly inverse pair of prints each in an edition 27. They share not only their oversized format but also their concern with form, motion and mapping space. As Sze explained, “These works investigate movement, disintegration, and disorientation. Here I wanted to enter a two-dimensional frame and find a location that is entropic, fragmenting, spinning, and adrift. These drawings frame a fragment of a larger system that could potentially expand beyond the frame. They start from an exploration of atmosphere, fleeting situations, and environments with a specific kind of weather."

Sze returned to the Neiman Center in 2007 to build a three-dimensional relief utilizing the printshop's laser engraver. Laser-cut and constructed from a composition pad printed using offset lithography, Notepad emerges from the wall with its individual sheets gently unfurling over a miniature model of a fire escape and ladder. Sze noted about this work, "I am interested in an object or image that plays with the state of its own existence. For example, a pad of paper that is carefully printed rather than mass produced or a collage that seems to be falling apart as much as coming together; in other words, its parts are holding the picture plane together and yet still maintaining their identity."

In 2011-12 Sze produced two works that investigate the process of sight. She conceived 2, a set of six screenprints, as a means to decontextualize the design of the Ishihara color blindness test and Eyechart, a laser-engraved popup, to reinterpret the traditional two-dimensional eye chart common to every doctor’s office. These projects were included in Sze’s solo exhibition, Sarah Sze: Infinite Line, held at The Asia Society, NYC in 2012.

Sarah Sze (b. 1969) is a New York based artist known for sculpture and installation works. She received a BA from Yale University in 1991 and a MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. She is currently a faculty member in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Sze has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2003); John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2003); Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (1999); and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation award (1997). Major exhibitions of her work have appeared at the Asia Society Museum, NYC; 10th Biennale de Lyon; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Malmo Konsthall; The Whitney Museum of American Art; Walker Art Center; Sao Paulo Bienal; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Fondation Cartier pour l'art Contemporain, Paris; the Carnegie International; and the 48th Venice Biennale.

Learn more about this artist:

Artist Interview
Artist's Website
Art21
MoMA

Sent us of the Air, 2023
Archival pigment print with collage and string on blind embossed paper
Sheet: 20 x 25 inches
Image: 11 ¼ x 17 ½ inches
Paper: Rives
Edition: 25
Price: $8,000

Night, 2003
Offset lithograph and screenprint
Sheet and image: 37 ¾ x 71 inches
Paper: Okawara
Edition: 27
POR

Day, 2003
Offset lithograph and screenprint
Sheet and image: 37 ¾ x 71 inches
Paper: Mulberry
Edition: 27
Sold out

Notepad, 2008
Laser engraved paper and board with offset lithography, push pins, paper cuttings 
and presentation box
Overall: 22 ½ x 11 x 8 inches
Paper: Somerset Bookweave, Strathmore Bristol and archival cardboard
Edition: 40
$18,000

Ripe Fruit Falling, 2012
Laser-cut screenprinted paper with hand-painted pebbles, string and pushpins
Overall: 47 x 19 ½ x 1 inch
Paper: Coventry Rag
Edition: 18
Sold out

Eyechart, 2011
Three-dimensional screenprint and laser engraving
Overall: 12 x 7 x 2 inches
Paper: Coventry Rag
Edition: 29
Sold out

2, 2011
Portfolio of six screenprints
Sheet: 18 x 18 inches, each
Image: 12 x 12 inches, each
Paper: Coventry Rag
Edition: 29
Sold out