Visual Arts Faculty Sarah Sze Will Represent the U.S. at the 2013 Venice Biennale

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Lyon in Studio, Sarah Sze
24-Feb-12
Sarah Sze, Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts, has been chosen to represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia in 2013. Her work will be presented by Holly Block and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in the 55th International Art Exhibition.

The work, titled Triple Point, will inhabit and directly comment upon the architecture of the 1930s Palladian-style structure of the U.S. Pavilion designed by famed architects William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich, appearing to modify the building’s structure without actual physical change.

“Sarah Sze is a perfect choice to deftly engage the U. S. Pavilion,” said Carol Becker, Dean of Faculty. “Her site-specific work is dramatic, playful, seductive and filled with ideas about the fragility and durability of contemporary life. She’s a fantastic artist, a great teacher and we are proud to have her on our faculty.”

Sze has won acclaim for her minutely detailed, accumulative installations, in which everyday items such as coffee cups, plastic bottles and electrical fans become vital objects that defy the boundaries between the throwaway and the precious, the mundane and the monumental.

Sze has always been known for work that challenges viewers to experience space in unexpected ways, and her installation at the U.S. Pavilion at the Biennale promises to do the same on a grand scale. Sze will create a sequence of constructed environments that will activate the Pavilion’s architecture and extend beyond the building and into the courtyard, blurring the perceptual boundaries between the site’s interior and exterior.

In conjunction with the installation, the Bronx Museum of the Arts will create a video stream documenting Sze’s process of conceiving, fabricating, and installing the piece. This will extend the project’s reach beyond the Giardini and link Sze with a worldwide audience.

Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969. She received a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. She has received critical acclaim for her public commissions and site-specific installations, including recent commissions for the New York City High Line, the Cartier Foundation, the Carnegie International and the São Paolo Biennial. A MacArthur Fellow and Louis Comfort Tiffany Award winner, she has challenged architectures and captivated viewers with her large-scale constructions that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings, burrow into the ground and stretch across museums. Solo museum projects include at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Institute of Contemporary Art, London. An exhibition of Sze’s drawings, Infinite Line is on view at the Asia Society in New York through March 25, 2012.
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Columbia University School of the Arts offers MFA degrees in Film, Theatre Arts, Visual Arts, and Writing, an MA degree in Film Studies, a joint JD/MFA degree in Theatre Management & Producing, and a PhD degree in Theatre History, Literature, and Theory.