Unearthing the Collection: American Narratives

Join Senior Curator Leanne Sacramone and embark on a journey through the soundscapes, skyscapes, and landscapes of American artists from the collection of the Fondation Cartier.

Curator Leanne Sacramone will deliver a conference on the works of Sarah Sze and Vija Celmins.

Although their visual languages are distinct, Sarah Sze and Vija Celmins both create labor-intensive works that reflect an extraordinary attention to materials. Armed with a nuanced palette of blacks and grays, Celmins painstakingly “redescribes” photographic images of the ocean, the night sky, and the desert with an uncanny accuracy, working for months on a single image. Sarah Sze constructs intricate architectural installations from the minutiae of everyday life, including still and moving images of spewing geysers, erupting volcanoes, and moonlit skies. Using pencil, paint, print and pixels, these two artists explore the nature of time and memory and our relationship to the cosmos. Their work reminds us that the images surrounding us exist in the unceasing interaction between the physical and the mental.