Sarah Sze Explores Image Making in Solo Exhibition 'Images in Translation' at Yale University Art Gallery
Visual Arts Professor Sarah Sze explores the shifting boundaries between painting and sculpture in Sarah Sze: Images in Translation, on view at the Yale University Art Gallery through February 14, 2027.
Organized by Keely Orgeman, the Gallery’s Seymour H. Knox, Jr. Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the exhibition pairs new paintings with Sze’s room-size sculpture Images in Translation (2019). Presented together, the works examine how images acquire meaning and material form.
Working across installation, printmaking, photography, and video, Sze challenges conventional distinctions between artistic media. Her materials and imagery are drawn from both everyday life and her own working environment; she often places ordinary objects and personal photographs alongside technical equipment and moving images. These combinations unsettle hierarchies between artistic tools, raw materials, and finished works.
Originally trained as a painter, Sze has long brought painting’s visual language into her sculptures. The exhibition statement for Images in Translation quotes Sze as saying, “[I]n the age of the image, a painting is a sculpture.”
Sze’s combination of everyday objects, technical equipment, and moving images takes physical form in the show’s titular sculpture, an interconnected arrangement of boxes, stools, tripods, papers, and cords. Videos are projected over three-dimensional structures, creating a multilayered composition. Scenes of nature and Sze’s studio connect the sculpture to imagery that also appears in her paintings.
The sculpture was first presented in Sze’s 2019 solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. The new paintings, publicly displayed for the first time at Yale, extend Sze’s investigation of how images are assembled, encountered, and transformed across different media. Throughout these works, images function as what Sze calls “portals,” opening connections between exterior landscapes and interior experience. Their fragmented and layered arrangements engage memory and imagination, inviting viewers to construct relationships across surfaces, objects, and the surrounding space.
This exhibition also integrates Sze’s practice with ordinary acts of looking, producing, sharing, and discarding images. As digital imagery becomes embedded in daily life, viewers occupy an increasingly active role in its circulation. By bringing traces of her workspace into the gallery, Sze invites audiences to consider their own participation in image making.
Sze, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and professor at Columbia University, earned her BA from Yale College in 1991 and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. Her work spans sculpture, painting, architecture, and public installation, exploring how the images and objects that surround us shape our sense of time and place. Sze represented the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale and presented a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2023. Her work is held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and she has created permanent public works for LaGuardia Airport and Storm King Art Center.