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Il Capricorno, San Marco 1994, Calle Drio La Chiesa, 30124, Venice, Italy
Open: Tue-Sat 10am-1pm & 2pm-6pm

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Artist: Sarah Sze

Victoria Miro presents Sarah Sze’s first exhibition at Victoria Miro Venice. This exhibition, the artist’s sixth with Victoria Miro, marks a return to Venice for Sze, who featured in the 1999 and 2015 Biennales and represented the United States with her exhibition Triple Point in the 2013 Biennale.

Two immersive environments explore how images are constructed and memories are formed. Sze will take over the gallery with a new moving-image installation and present a suite of new paintings in surroundings that bring the mise-en-scène of Sze’s New York studio to a nearby Venetian apartment, uncannily evoking a sense that the artist has just stepped away from her place of work.

Sze’s latest video work transforms the gallery with an array of ever-changing projections suspended throughout the space. Carefully composed, the projections invite the viewer to visually navigate the work, forming a personal narrative by journeying from one image to the next. Interested in shattering the singularity of an image, and in dismantling any hierarchy of visual material, Sze’s installation questions the nature of looking and underscores how images are fundamental to memory.

On view in the salon rooms of an apartment opposite the gallery, Sze creates a total environment with a series of paintings presented within a simulation of the space in which they were made. Again considering the perception of images, Sze’s enquiry is one of orientation: how does one locate oneself in a painting, and how can a painting’s effect be one of disorientation? Compositionally complex, the works incorporate both art historical strategies and digital techniques. These are paintings that reward the act of looking: the eye is always engaged in a process of putting the paintings together and taking them apart.

A sense of discovery and indulging the pleasure of being lost rather than arriving at a destination has informed all of Sze’s oeuvre, and the experience of Venice as a place, its unique invitation to wander, is echoed within the exhibition. All of the works on view incorporate imagery – even if layered and hidden – that Sze has captured or created in the city.

About the artist

For the past thirty years, Sarah Sze has developed a singular visual language that challenges the static nature of art with a dynamic body of work spanning sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1969, Sze lives and works in New York. Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. The artist has exhibited in museums worldwide, and her works are held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions, including Tate, UK; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; MUDAM, Luxembourg; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Sze has also created public works for the High Line in New York, the city’s Second Avenue Subway Station, and the new LaGuardia Airport.

Current and recent solo exhibitions include: Sarah Sze: Timelapse, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023) and a solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (until 18 August 2024).

Sarah Sze: Metronome, a new work co-commissioned and co-produced by Artangel, UK, OGR Torino, Italy, and Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark, opens at ARoS on 18 May and continues until 20 October 2024.