Artist-in-Residence

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze, Untitled (detail from exhibition Sarah Sze at The Fabric Workshop and Museum), 2013. Mixed media. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging.

Sarah Sze at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (2013-14) was the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Philadelphia area. Sze is known for her site-specific sculptures and installations that combine mundane objects, ranging from hardware store items to household plants, to create elaborate, architectural presentations imbuing the everyday with surprising significance. Her work incorporates her ranging interests in visual art, architecture, science, and philosophy.

Sze’s exhibition at FWM explored the construction and measurement of space, mass, time, and volume through the use of materials. Three museum floors contained different experiments. Each one turned the viewer’s sense of scale, gravity, and information on its head. Common objects like rocks, newspapers, and furniture mutated from something known to something foreign, fragile, newly composed, and entirely transformed.


Artist Bio

American, born 1969, lives and works in New York, NY. 

With a practice that spans sculpture, painting, installation, video, and printmaking, Sarah Sze uses art to destabilize the relationships between images, nature, and contemporary technologies. She received her BA in architecture and painting from Yale University in 1991 and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. A recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, Sze has exhibited widely, including her representation of the United States of America at the 48th Venice Biennale in 2013, 1999 Carnegie International, 2000 Whitney Biennial, and at the Asia Society, New York, and Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY. Sze has also produced several public works including a large-scale installation for the Seattle Opera House in 2005 and a commission for the renovated Terminal B at LaGuardia International Airport in 2020. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Tate Modern, London, and The Fabric Workshop and Museum.