'Feel Free': Professor Sarah Sze's Los Angeles Debut at Gagosian

Professor of Visual Arts Sarah Sze’s debut gallery exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills, Sarah Sze: Feel Free, opened recently, bringing together two immersive video installations with new large-scale paintings featuring Sze's signature layered surfaces.

Unfolding across three interconnected galleries, Feel Free casts collage as an interdisciplinary language, taking apart and reconstructing the image as a three-dimensional form. For Sze, this process of fragmentation and reconstruction mirrors the process by which the mind takes in information and makes memories in a media-saturated world.

Experiencing Sze's video installations—Sleepers (Variable dimensions, mixed media, paper, string, video projectors, aluminum, 2024) and Once in a Lifetime (variable dimensions, mixed media, wood, projectors, tripods, ladder, lights, aluminum, ceramic, paper, paint, 2026)—is sort of like watching a Sze painting come to life: a proliferation of projected images toss shimmering reflections onto the gallery floor; the silhouette of an ungulate is suspended in a fantastically precarious architecture, illuminated by a field of fluctuating light.

If the installations are primarily shaped by shifting conditions of light, the paintings are structured by color. A sunset in one painting is recalled by a circular stroke of orange in another. Images recur and mutate across the exhibition, recreating the subtle intimacy of a shared memory.

Following the exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present Sarah Sze: Forever is Composed of Nows, opening November 21, 2026. Transforming the museum’s Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium, the site-specific, multisensory installation is Sze's most ambitious commission to date. 

Feel Free is on view January 29–February 28, 2026 at Gagosian Beverly Hills.