Artist Sarah Sze: “A work of art ends when everything swings.” Sarah S

WWith just 13 pieces—11 art pieces and two video installations—artist Sarah Sze’s new show at Gagosian Beverly Hills packs a punch in a relatively simple presentation. The paintings themselves are large—up to 8 feet by 16 feet—and their complexity demands long looks. Moreover, the artist has arranged the space perfectly, evoking a poignant and comprehensive experience from beginning to end. “I’m always interested in talking to architecture and planning how to have an experience that unfolds over time,” Sze told me via video interview.

Long known as an accomplished practitioner of collage, Sze here relies on landscape as a general means of organizing space on her canvas, but then changes it radically to offer experiences that simultaneously feel subtly familiar and entirely new.

“I wanted there to be enough that you constantly read it as a landscape, but you still have to put it together,” Sze said. “The goal is to get to a place where the work speaks to you.”

In creating works that seem to be in a constant state of flux and constantly force viewers to redirect them, Sze is inspired by contemporary society, where the proliferation of images and videos recorded on smartphones, as well as the exclusive prevalence of artificial intelligence deepfakes and disinformation spread by powerful actors, has led to a world that feels fundamentally ungrounded.

“I feel like we’ve become so preoccupied with the images outside our eyes. How do we position ourselves in a world that always seems to be changing all the time, when it’s not very clear whether the information is correct or not?” Sze thought. “With these images, I want you to actively try to orient yourself within them, to be active in that state where you are trying to find direction.”

The six paintings are chromatically cohesive, full of the colors of dusk and dawn—ultrachromatic, lavender, pastel yellow and icy blue—interspersed with bursts of light reminiscent of spherical clusters of stars. They also drop subtle touches, such as a pair of hands spreading a deck of playing cards as if inviting the viewer to take one, or a mysterious fox that appears to dart across the board. Wide, winding vertical bands run through these works, while thin lines explode and slide at all angles. The result feels like a contradiction, paintings that constantly vibrate with a sense of movement yet are comfortable and contained in their perfection.

“I want there to be this experience where you’re wavering all the time — and you’re disoriented, then you orient yourself and then you’re disoriented again,” Sze said. “The work of art ends when everything swings. I want this idea of ​​perfect tension, where everything is on a tightrope.”

In her video installation “Sleepers” — one of two on view in the show — Sze drew on two very different personal experiences: the escalating horror of the moment she nearly drowned, and the meditative intimacy of watching her daughters sleep. The rising human breath that stimulates sleepers is Sze’s breathing, which she recorded while running, taking the idea from a powerful memory of her gasping as she fought for her life. “I had a near-drowning experience, and I realized I was in trouble when I heard myself gasping,” Sze recalls. “The idea that your body can talk to you is important in this piece.”

Visually, Sleepers is based on video recordings that Sze made of her two daughters while they slept. The installation is partly about what it means to be a mother, watching time slip by as the daughters rush through the accelerated experience of childhood, trying to catch those fleeting moments of calm and closeness that are part of parenting. “There’s a kind of real intimacy and tenderness when you see someone else sleeping,” Sze said. “Their vulnerability and your inability to engage in what they engage in. The idea of ​​being there and being fully present in a world that you can’t enter.”

In trying to change the way we view our image-saturated world with Don’t Hesitate, Sze draws inspiration from two key 19th-century figures – Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne Jules Marey – of how their studies of animal movement changed the way people saw the world. Among other things, Muybridge settled the debate about whether a horse’s four hooves leave the ground when it gallops, and Mary showed, among other things, how cats always manage to land on their feet. “Muybridge and Mary were really interesting to me, and they were arguably the first filmmakers. They used images to demonstrate something physical in the world, to see the world in a way that we might not otherwise notice,” Sze said. “I think it’s a really interesting idea that art can be a tool to improve the way we see the world.”

In addition to wanting to challenge audiences to look differently at the wide range of images that are now part of everyday life, Sze also enjoyed making these pieces. By contrasting these paintings with other paintings that she really struggled to put together, this body of work put her into a state of flow where she was able to act on her intuition and immerse herself in the creative process. “There was a lot of joy in getting the work done,” she said. “I really enjoyed making it, and I think maybe the joy comes out of it. I did things that were weird to me, and one thing led to another thing and I kind of trusted it. I wanted the videos and paintings to really blend.”

Sze hopes that Feel Free will help audiences tap into what’s going on inside their brains, and help them explore the treasure trove of memories that every person holds. “I think paintings are very important right now because they are a way to see things in our heads,” she said.

In a constant process of deconstruction and reconstruction, these paintings give insight into how our worldview is actually a creative process, a process derived in part from the many images we constantly take. “This becomes the theme of the show, how a work of art can be not just a way of seeing the world, but also an active way of seeing how images are constructed,” Sze said. “We hope this idea will be put into action.”