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Sarah Sze, Poet Of Clutter
at Tanya Bonadkar Gallery, NYC and MoMa, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
For several decades, Sarah Sze has artfully transformed detritus into art, whether it’s the corner of Central Park at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, where she submerged a mini-replica of the white brick apartment complex across the street, filling it with objects from socks to alarm clocks, (Corner Plot, 2006), or the clever 1997 transformation of a closet in the Tribeca loft of Michael and Susan Hort, major Manhattan art collectors. Consider her the poet of clutter.
In recent years, the artist has focused on her own personal detritus, the method of her madness — or maybe essence of her magic: the potpourri of materials, references and the tools of her craft, creating large-scale installations that emulate interior of her working studio, and, by extension, the interior of her mind. Sze suspends her inventive ideas and associations in 3-dimensional space. The result is, in a sense, a new kind of kinetic sculpture: she is like a high-tech Jean Tinguely for the information age.
In her first solo show since 2015, Sze turned the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery — from its storefront windows to its entrance, and throughout its two first-floor galleries — into a revelatory exploration of the non-stop flow of transient images that cross her, and everyone else’s, field of…
