Sarah Sze

In 1999, the Fondation Cartier presented the first solo exhibition in France of this young artist. In honour of the occasion, Sze designed an installation entitled Everything That Rises Must Converge. It was made up of some one hundred objects of varying sizes that the artist sourced in markets, shops and hardware stores. This constellation was laid out from floor to ceiling in the two spaces on the ground floor. As always, faithful to the artists we support, the Fondation Cartier invited Sze to return in 2020. She presented De Nuit en Jour, an immersive exhibition for which she designed two sculptures, Twice Twilight and Tracing Fallen Sky, which were part of her Timekeeper series, which she began in 2015. Once again playing with perceptions of scale, the structure of both installations is inspired by essentially secular instruments, the planetarium and the pendulum, one created to unfold the map of the cosmos and the other, to measure the rotation of the Earth.

Since the late 1990s, Sze has been assembling and curating objects from daily life, and using them to create delicate, complex installations that challenge the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture. She has also introduced video into her oeuvre, exploring the ways in which a proliferation of images can transform our relationships with objects, time and memory. She gathers objects and images from both the physical and digital world, which she goes on to piece together into complex multimedia works that challenge notions of scale, inviting the viewer to both microscopic observation, and a macroscopic perspective on the infinite. Sze makes use of several media, from sculpture to painting by way of drawing, engraving, video and installations. Her work notably questions notions of entropy and temporality, and explores the ephemeral nature of materiality.