Sarah Sze at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas is proof the affair between an artist and museum doesn’t always result in marriage.
Sarah Sze
February 3–August 18, 2024
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
In the past six months, Sarah Sze has exhibited in New York, London, Taiwan, and, as of February 3, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, where three site-specific sculptures, all made in 2024, are on display. She responds to her surroundings and is keenly aware of the built environment, which is integral to displaying at the museum. But in Sarah Sze, you have to wonder what she’s responding to.
Like in her other shows, with her signature mix of paintings, video, and sound, grounded by leftover objects from her studio such as tape dispensers, she spices up the gallery space—an easy task in the conservative Renzo Piano–designed building.
Museums are built to exhibit art, with galleries adapting to whatever. But in the case of the Nasher, solely focused on sculpture and its potential, the venue is always part of show. Defined by its five barrel-vaulted pavilions with floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking the large sculpture garden, the Nasher contains three galleries on the ground floor and a smaller gallery below.
The organic Cave Painting hangs in the entry, with a shotgun view of the street and where visitors see their first sculpture. This smart move by Piano is meant to define the experience by showing something big. Cave Painting challenges the idea any sculpture must be big and bronze. Stripped of Sze’s occasional fussiness, hanging from the ceiling are photographs of nature cut into and grounded by objects used in its creation. Here, she integrates the sculpture into the garden behind it.
Quite the contrast are the other works, Slow Dance and Love Song, where two less developed videos and soundscapes about nature and the built environment at large take over. Each occupy their respective galleries. Here Sze has a free-for-all, presenting flashes of animals, seasons, and landscapes coming and going through synchronous video clips. Slow Dance sweeps across the room, with a loose story about animals starting at the ceiling and melting into the floor.
In the downstairs gallery, meant for art sensitive to light, is Love Song. In the center is an aluminum tree with audio visual technology spinning dizzyingly, blazing images of seasons across the wall. It’s not even kitschy but immersive, the sort of word used for commercial works and touring massive electronic Van Gogh shows. It’s meant to reflect on time, as her work does, by portraying rapid seasonal changes. And it does, but lacks a Sze punch.
Sze’s strength is how she blends the setting and makes the materials, like cloth, metal, paper and plywood, also central to her work. They’re not merely functional but, just as a brick is to a building, integral to the work. Her strongest work makes clear space, too, is everything. That’s not particularly clear here.
