Interiority is a concept that multimedia artist Sarah Sze has been focusing on lately.
“Much of what we experience is actually internal,” Sze said in a recent video interview. “We've become so outward-focused. We're so open to the outside.”
At a time when it's all too easy to consume an endless stream of images from social media, the celebrated New York-based artist is more interested in scrolling through the images stored in her own mind.
His new show, “Feel Free,” champions the mind’s eye, in all its random, fragmented splendor. Brings a collection of new paintings and two immersive video installations to Gagosian Beverly Hills.
Sze is known for her unconventional sculptures and large-scale paintings, which she exhibits at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, and the United States Pavilion at multiple Venice Biennales. In 2023 he left his mark on both the interior corridors and the exterior walls of the Guggenheim Museumand his public sculptures have transformed a grassy hillside as well as a pinewood and a international airport.
Sarah Sze’s show at Gagosian Beverly Hills, “Feel Free,” is meant to be intimate.
(Ariana Drehsler/for The Times)
At the Gagosian show, Sze leaned toward the intimate and fragile, while continuing his trademark experimental streak.
In one of his most recent pieces, “Once in a Lifetime,” part sculpture, part video exhibition, precarious clusters of trinkets form a mechanical marvel that appears to defy gravity.
A stack of small projectors sits inside a fantastical tower made up of criss-crossing tripods, metal poles, and ladders adorned with an array of toothpick structures, empty cardboard containers that once held crayons and Lactaid, hanging prisms, craft scraps, and paper cutouts of deer and wolves (figures that appear throughout the show).
The bare gallery walls surrounding the monument flash with rotating projections of construction sites where buildings are being erected and demolished, clouds floating across calm blue skies, and city lights flickering and then slowly dissolving into floating fractals. The Dadaist piece is as extravagant and fascinating as the Talking Heads song that inspired its title.
“Once in a Lifetime” is part video exhibit and part sculpture, made of tripods, toothpicks, lights, cardboard boxes and projectors that project images onto the gallery walls. (Ariana Drehsler/for The Times)
“The most important thing about my show is that I hope it's really challenging and exciting and that it gives young artists the license to do whatever they want,” Sze said.
“When they come in and say, 'Wait… I didn't know you could put toothpicks up to the ceiling and shoot a video through them and turn it into a movie. I didn't know you could put a bunch of stuff on the floor in front of a painting.' It's like, 'Okay! Yes, you can!'”
Meanwhile, large canvases in the main gallery space are covered with oil and acrylic paints and printed backgrounds dotted with a variety of images: sleeping female figures; hands pointing, drawing and showing peace signs; the sun at different stages of its setting; birds in flight; wolves and deer in their natural habitats. On top are layers of paint stains and streaks, as well as taped paper and vellum, which blur and obscure the collage of figures beneath.
“Escape Artist,” left, “White Night,” and “Feel Free” are new paintings by Sarah Sze at Gagosian Beverly Hills.
(Ariana Drehsler/for The Times)
“One of the things I was thinking about was that when we dream and then wake up, there's that extreme, fleeting moment where you try to catch the dream,” Sze said. “The dream disappears at the same time and you're trying to recreate those images.”
He went on to describe “a landscape that turns into a different landscape, and then you fall, and then you spin, and then someone appears who you didn't expect to be there.”
In addition to this subconscious revelry, the artist offers glimpses of her creative process. Piled up on the floor beneath the canvases (and even hanging from the rafters above) are a variety of tools of their trade, from tape measures to paint scrapers. Paintbrushes, pens and pencils lie next to the torn cuffs of cotton work shirts, and drops of blue and white paint splash on the floor, extending the artwork beyond the wall.
Sze spent five days installing the exhibition inside the gallery, and the common materials incorporated into the pieces are what she called “remnants of the workspace.”
“Sleepers,” a video installation that Sze premiered in 2024, plays with the light coming through a gallery window. Images of sleeping heads and forest animals play amid the sound of cello notes and deep breaths.
(Ariana Drehsler/for The Times)
If the paintings act as snapshots of dreamlike landscapes, “Sleepers,” the video installation that premiered in 2024, puts those images in motion. Dozens of hand-torn fragments of paper connected by rows of string become miniature projection screens, each flickering with images of the same sleeping heads, busy hands, and forest animals. These are interspersed with flashes of television static and ocean waves, all accompanied by sounds of humming, disjointed cello notes, and deep breathing.
“Feel Free” by Sarah Sze
When: From Tuesday to Saturday, from 10 am to 5:30 pm, until February 28
Where: Gagosian Beverly Hills, 456 N. Camden Drive in Beverly Hills
Directly in the center, a slender vertical window, part of the gallery architecture, illuminates the otherwise dark room with a column of natural light, further contributing to the ethereal nature of the piece.
Viewed at the right angle, the piece looks like a giant eye. It's the perfect visual cue to get visitors thinking about what we see and how we see it.
