Sarah Sze’s studio is an encyclopedic celebration of the human experience. A 19th-century time-lapse of galloping horses, pre-Columbian cave paintings and a reproduction of Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656) line the white walls of his split-level New York studio, a former carriage house used by the barons of golden age of the city. For Sze, whose cerebral environmental works have pushed sculpture and painting into new formal and psychological realms, these images are part of a continuum: artifacts whose psychic power erases the years that separate us from our past selves. “Art is really about having a conversation with time,” he told me during a recent visit. “You’re standing in front of a great piece of art and you’re talking about generations.”
Time—how it is recorded and remembered and ultimately how it fades—is intrinsic to Sze’s work, perhaps never more so than in “Timelapse,” her exhibition held last year at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. For Sze, the museum became “a place to explore the idea of a public clock.” He transformed the white bays of the Guggenheim into sculptural magpie nests with pieces like “Timekeeper” (2016), a desk filled with a cornucopia of objects: a metronome. digital clocks that tell the time in different parts of the world. torn archival color prints of a perfect sky for postcards. newton’s cradle Stacked and mounted video projectors hurled moving images across the room — a bird in flight, rippling water, static television. In another work, “A certain inclination” (2023), a pendulum hung from a ladder above a dolly (balanced on the manufacturer’s levels) and passed over a floor covered in white sand that had seemingly been spilled from a broken hourglass.
Sze, 55 — professor of visual arts at Columbia University whose work is in its collections Museum of Modern Art and Whitney — showed an early sensitivity to the relationship of sculpture to its environment from an early age, perhaps because he grew up with an architect father. (Her mother was a teacher.) At Yale, she majored in painting, but also studied architecture. Her work has been frequently commissioned and exhibited at venues such as Renzo Piano’s Nasher Sculpture Center at Dallas and Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s High Line in Manhattan. “I try and come to every architecture [project] like it’s a conversation with this building and there’s a kind of marriage,” he said.
In April, Sze debuted a show at the Victoria Miro Gallery in Venice. It’s a homecoming of sorts — she lived in the Italian city for six months with her two children and her husband, oncologist and “Emperor of All Diseases” (2010) author Siddhartha Mukherjee, when she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The show was split into two parts, with one half hanging in the main gallery and the other displayed in a nearby space that Victoria Miro usually uses as an apartment. In preparation, Sze converted large parts of her approximately 7,000-square-foot studio in New York into a life-size facsimile of the exhibition, complete with a replica of the view of a neighboring canal.
Sze took me to this model exhibition, starting at the entrance of the apartment. Splashes of butter yellow, blue-grey, and fluorescent orange decorated the walls, except for several distinct pristine white rectangles—the places where the paintings seemed to have once hung. Sze made a trompe l’oeil tapestry of these surfaces, which she then grafted onto the walls of the exhibition’s living room. “You see the remnants of something that happened but is gone, and you jump into the imagination,” he said. “Bringing life to the experience of seeing a work of art is what interested me.” Further back, he showed me a handful of acid-hued, near-abstract paintings he called “gates,” each with a digital collage that evokes dystopian sci-fi landscapes in the Anthropocene. In Paris, Sze is having this moment exposure to projection at Gagosian featuring an immersive video installation and a series of new paintings.
“The paintings that I basically just make by myself and, like, I’m locked away,” she told me. We sat together on the second floor of her studio, the smell of turpentine hanging in the air, as Sze answered artist T’s questionnaire.
How is your day;
I get up at 6 in the morning and then I take my daughter to school. I’m in the studio at 8:30 am. What I do first, I end up doing the longest — I try to be very disciplined about immediately starting to do only creative work. Like 9 in the morning, no email, nothing to distract. I immediately start making art. Then when I’m the most dysfunctional and tired of my day, like 4pm, I’ll do other things. But I try to keep this space open. That doesn’t mean I’m making great artwork all this time. Sometimes it’s just an hour of work that actually comes together, but I try not to let distractions creep in.
how much do you sleep
I go to bed probably between 12am. and 1 a.m. I never needed much sleep.
What is the first piece of art you made?
My father had dug a foundation for a building. My brother and I used to play on the mound because the mound never left. (When you build a house, there’s a mound of dirt, and then they remove the dirt, but that dirt just became this eternal pile.) We dug a hole in the middle of it and played in it, in a tunnel. Then I remember seeing a report on TV that there were these five kids who had done it – and four of them had died. One lived because they had created an air shell. They made their bodies into a kind of cave, so that they bent over themselves and squeezed. It collapsed on their backs and they lived in this inner shell, this hole. So I would go to this hole and do that. I feel like this was the first piece of art because we were building something. It was sculptural, it was collaborative. I was thinking about life, death and the sculptural form.
Did you hear the story and then make the play?
No, we were building the tunnel and then I heard it. It was a strange thing for that time – that age is so interesting. At that age, I would be like, “Okay, I’m not going in that tunnel!” But at that age, I was curious.
What’s the worst studio you’ve ever been in?
There was so much that wasn’t great. The worst studio I ever had, I mean, it wasn’t a great oil painting in your own bedroom.
Because of the smell?
Yes, because it was completely toxic.
What is the first work you ever sold and how much?
I remember getting second prize for a painting when I was very young. I think someone bought it for $10. I remember it wasn’t first prize, it was “second prize, painting show”.
How old were you when you joined?
I think I was in fourth grade. I still have it at my parents’ house, second prize, which is really funny.
When you start a new piece, where do you start?
Each project creates the next. And I really believe — I tell my students — it’s an interesting way to work and keep the work flowing: When you’re making one piece, you’re already thinking about the next one.
How do you know when you’re done?
To me a piece is made when it’s in that teetering stage, where it’s not too much of one thing or too much of the other — so if a painting has too much oil and not enough acrylic. I want, for example, the paintings to be between a photograph—what an image is—and what an oil painting can do, what acrylic can do, what a print can do. I want you to have this confusion between them. It always flickers. It is fragile. What is it made of? [of] always falling apart and coming together before your eyes. And this is a very specific note. Towards the end of creating a project, it is always certain [what] that note is: Your foot is still in the air, it hasn’t landed. And that means sometimes you have to go back and get that mix perfect.
How many assistants do you have?
Seven.
Have you helped other artists in the past? If so, who?
I made a decision when I was doing art from undergrad not to. But I think everyone is different. I worked at the Nea Niki Theatre [in New York] as the person who answered the phones and then told people where to go with the walkie-talkie. I didn’t want to have my job in the art world.
Do you listen to music when you make art?
I play music when I want to dance in the studio. I think the way we listen to music has changed in my lifetime. I used to play CDs, mixtapes. I really really like to dance, so I dance, but as a break. But usually, weirdly, I don’t hear anything, or I hear narration, which is weird, I think.
So, podcasts?
Podcasts, books. And I think why it works for me is it’s a way of distracting me. It’s almost like the Freudian sofa, where you don’t look [at your therapist]. It actually puts you in a place where it allows you to not focus so much on the thing itself.
When did you first feel comfortable saying you were a professional artist?
From a very young age I considered myself an artist. I was always taken as an artist. I was interpreted as an artist at school. They put me as an artist in my family. I was making art all the time. They weren’t like the friends they used to be [like], “What should I do with my life?” I didn’t have much choice. I think that’s pretty much been my identity from the beginning.
What do you do when you’re late?
I have delayed looking at animal shelters because I am going to adopt a dog. I go online and look at all the dogs. But I can’t do it until after [Venice] projection.
What’s the last thing that made you cry?
In fact, the two are connected. I had to put my dog to sleep. I mean, there are so many things to cry about in the world right now — I feel like that’s a little self-indulgent. I don’t know if you are an animal person?
Yes.
So, you know, when you lose an animal, it’s just kind of pure grief. It’s different from anything else because animals are, and pets are, self-sacrifice, love, devotion. There is no ambiguity there.
What do you usually wear when you work?
I wear what I wear, which means I have color in everything I wear.
What do you buy in bulk most often?
My guilty pleasure that I buy in bulk with the most frequency is Vasari Payne is Grey.
What is this;
Vasari is this incredible oil paint maker and I love Payne’s Grey.
What is your worst habit?
I do not know what overbear but I have no sense of time, which can make it difficult for me. I’ve done a lot of work over time, but I’m not a great timekeeper.
What is your favorite piece of art by someone else?
There are so many, but I will say “Las Meninas” by Velázquez.
What job do you regret or would you do differently now?
I guess I would say I don’t think of work that way. Work doesn’t always get better — we know that. When you make something that feels really strong, there’s a sense of dread because it’s like What can you do next?
And sometimes the fight is next. Creative resilience is really important. you have to work through the bad job to get to the good job. The job that doesn’t work does the next job that does.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
