Sara Sez

Sarah Sze

Even the details in Sarah Sze’s sculptures have details. All her installations are extraordinarily ambitious and are constructed with fastidious precision, consequently, her output is relatively small compared with many other artists. Every thing in its right place, 2002–03, is one of her most important and most ambitious works. The apparently fragile but user-friendly beauty of Sze’s giant structure, its spectacular, spreading forms and its model-building virtuosity, while deeply attuned to the present, also has an integral relationship to the history of painting – in particular to Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles: Number 11 1952, 1952, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Sze’s model-making methodology is both practical and structural. She makes sections in her studio, combines prefabricated parts on-site according to exact specifications, and supplements these with elements sourced on location, like a film director looking for props. Her works are carefully crated, tagged and marked for reassembly.

The multitude of small parts in Sze’s Every thing in its right place shifts us away from a panoramic spectatorship to inspection mode. The site-specificity of Sarah Sze’s work is best understood through the idea of environments created by overarching structures of collection and models, where narratives and nostalgias intersect as property and space, affecting us through the flickering effect of their soaring elegance and beaut