ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze gathers objects and images from both the physical and digital realms, weaving them into intricate multimedia compositions that oscillate between the minute and the monumental, offering expansive views of the infinite. A master bricoleur, she navigates an ever-expanding range of media with precision and restraint. Her evolving, generative practice encompasses sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation, consistently probing the fragility of material form while engaging questions of entropy, time, and transience.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Sarah Sze has opened a major new solo exhibition, “Feel Free”, at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. This presentation, marking Sze’s debut gallery show in Los Angeles, brings together two immersive video installations alongside a bold new suite of large-format paintings that extend her interrogation of materiality and image culture.

Sze, born in Boston in 1969 and based in New York, has spent more than three decades redefining how everyday objects and images are experienced in space and time. Her work draws from Modernist traditions while incorporating the profusion of digital and material detritus that characterizes contemporary life. Her installations, often sprawling and delicately balanced, confront how we perceive objects, memory, and time within conditions of information overload.

At the conceptual core of Feel Free is a redefinition of collage—not as a flat assemblage of disparate media, but as a spatial and temporal language that evolves across mediums in flux. Sze transforms the image itself into a sculptural material; fragments of visual content are constantly in motion, shifting between projection, shadow, surface, and memory. This recursive process of fragmentation and reconstruction enables the works to map the rhythms of perception in a world saturated by media—the ways our senses, emotions, and recollections are conditioned by ubiquitous image streams.

The exhibition unfolds across three interconnected galleries, each of which operates according to a distinct internal logic that governs its relationship to light, material, and time. In this architectural choreography, imagery traverses states of visibility and opacity: moving across constructed forms, splintering into color, dissolving into shadow, and reemerging as quiet traces. Many of these images resemble “interior visions”—impressions held in memory that only cohere when they return to conscious sight. In doing so, Sze deliberately collapses the divide between what we see in the gallery and what we carry in the mind’s eye.

Two major sculptural video installations function as anchor points for this exhibition’s exploration of image as spatial event.

“Sleepers” (2024) unfolds across a constellation of suspended surfaces, organized into a sequence of interwoven chapters. Projected light moves from plane to plane, appearing and dissolving in space to create an internal rhythm of sight and sound. These projected narratives are not static images; they become kinetic agents that inhabit and enliven the physical environment.

In “Once in a Lifetime” (2026), projections meet sculptural forms that modulate and interrupt the field of light. Here, images refract through shadow and reflection, collapsing and expanding as they encounter three-dimensional surfaces. The effect is a refractive topology where light and structure are inseparable—image becomes event, and projection becomes object. Together, the installations demonstrate Sze’s ongoing interest in revealing images as unstable spatial phenomena shaped by architecture, surface, and shifting perceptual conditions.

The third gallery of “Feel Free” features Sze’s newest paintings, which further blur the boundary between painting and image construction. Employing a mix of oil and acrylic paint, photographic fragments, digital imagery, collage, and found objects, these layered surfaces extend her experiments in representation, form, and dimension. Through compositions that modulate scale and tempo, glimpses of observed and remembered worlds converge, generating a pictorial field that is as much about perceptual velocity as it is about surface.

These paintings cannot be read in isolation; they are in dialogue with the video installations and the spatial logics of the galleries themselves. Sze’s hybrid approach draws attention to how images circulate, recombine, and persist—echoing lived experience in the media age.

The recursive structures of “Feel Free” mirror how imagery traverses contemporary life and memory—returning in flashes, mutating with context, and persisting across shifting physical states. The exhibition’s material logic reflects broader themes in Sze’s career: the fragile entanglement of objects and ideas, the persistence of memory in collective and individual registers, and the transformation of perception into tangible material.

Throughout her practice, Sze has aimed to collapse the distance between the artwork and the viewer. In Feel Free, this distance is further reduced as perception itself becomes visible—often fleetingly—within the oscillations of light, image, and form. As viewers navigate the interconnected galleries, they encounter not merely objects and projections but situations of seeing: immersive, unstable, and acutely responsive to the contingent interplay of media and material.

“Feel Free” thus stands as a sophisticated reflection on how images shape our understanding of time, memory, and self in a world where visual culture is both ubiquitous and elusive.

Photo: Sarah Sze, Breathless (detail), 2026, Oil paint, acrylic paint, acrylic polymers, ink, Dibond, aluminum, and wood, 103 1/4 x 202 x 3 inches (262.3 x 513.1 x 7.6 cm), © Sarah Sze, Photo: Maris Hutchinson, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA, USA, Duration: 29/1-28/2/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, https://gagosian.com/