The Brooklyn Rail

Sarah Sze is obviously a patient person. To create public art, she needs to be. From start to finish, it took Sze almost ten years to complete Blueprint for a Landscape (2017), her tiled walls for the Q subway station at Second Avenue and 96th Street. Then, over a course of 36 months, she designed Shorter than the Day (2020), a hanging, five-ton spherical aggregation of metal rods and nine hundred photographs of New York skies, suspended majestically in LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B.

Yet, even installations commissioned by museums can stretch out for inordinate periods of time. After giving a talk at the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2016, Sze was invited to hold a show there. COVID intervened. Now, the enchanting spaces the Yale-educated artist has filled at this jewel-box-like Dallas institution have opened. It’s a body of work that’s exhilarating, thought-provoking, and visually enticing.

Sze’s three installations (all 2024) at the Nasher are astonishingly unlike one another, and much less like other art she previously has crafted. Each one is also extraordinarily labor intensive. Cave Painting, a construction that is—and should be—approached from a distance, is visible as soon as you enter the museum. In a walkthrough she gave the night of the opening, Sze aptly referred to Cave Painting as “a portal to a landscape.” A three-dimensional collage, it takes Pablo Picasso’s singular Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) to new heights. Composed of three voluminous tiers, it resembles an artificial tree, one that conceptually could join the other arboreal delights in the sculpture garden just outside that’s glimpsed through a glass wall and doors.

When you stand beside this colorful amalgamation of double-sided torn paper elements that reference sculpture, painting, photography, and printmaking, you find a variety of unrelated images. Up close, details, rather than the overall configuration, intrigue. There are suns setting over waves of water, clouds in blue skies, hands, details of a Jackson Pollock-like poured painting, branches, a soaring eagle. Placed on the floor underneath the piece is stuff that might have been used to fabricate it. These items include cord, paint, masking tape, and somewhat mysteriously, a box of kitchen matches. Sensitive to the reactions of gallery goers, Sze once explained of her work, “Each piece should feel like a studio visit.”

In an adjacent gallery, Sze shows Slow Dance, a 14-minute cycle of videos projected onto scores of pieces of torn paper. These irregularly edged, mostly rectangular “screens” are attached to strings that run from the ceiling to the floor. Two substantial units face one another. Sequences include cheerful, radiant landscapes; black-and-white views such as a train pulling out of a subway station; and abstract passages of magenta, marigold, and other hues. Outlines of the screens appear on the floor as well as the back walls. Occasionally, everything disappears, and you find yourself standing in a barren space. As the artist once put it, “[A] show has to have crescendos and pauses.” I was never able to figure out how Sze kept track of the hundreds of elements she coordinated in this work. It was truly perplexing. Still, I didn’t let it detract from my enjoyment of what I was viewing. The sheer profusion of images was riveting.

Love Song completes the trilogy of site-specific works. Installed in the special exhibition space on the lower level of the Renzo Piano-designed building, its revolving metal object in the center of the gallery is a counterpoint to travel vignettes that move continuously around the three surrounding walls. The entire space is more mysterious at night than during the day when light filters in. The rotating construction can be compared to a tree evoking the four seasons, with one section even having homemade green leaves attached to it. But it’s also like an artist’s easel as well as a magic lantern. The vignettes introduce a sense of longing for other places and lands.

The three galleries that Sze has filled all relate to time. You’re very aware of walking towards Cave Painting while Slow Dance constantly projects its images. Love Song has two tempi: the orbiting object in the middle of the space as well as the evanescent vignettes. Once again, Sze has continued to defy all sorts of conventional expectations concerning what constitutes a work of art.