ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about artist Sarah Sze. Late one afternoon in December, the artist Sarah Sze and six assistants were completing the installation of eight new sculptures at the Asia Society, on the Upper East Side. Sze, who will represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013, arranges everyday objects into sculptural installations of astonishing intricacy. She joins things manufactured to help build other things (ladders, levels, winches, extension cords) with hundreds of commonplace items (Q-tips, pushpins, birthday candles, aspirin tablets), creating elaborate compositions that extend from gallery walls, creep into corners, and surge toward ceilings. Sze’s show, which ran through March, was about the relationships between landscape and architecture, and sculpture and line. Several pieces of finished sculpture had been fashioned in Sze’s studio during the previous months, but since arriving at the museum they’d been dismantled and reconfigured so extensively that only a fifth of the original compositions would end up in the show. “You have to be willing to destroy what you’ve made, in order to let it evolve,” Sze said. She is married to the Indian-born oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, whose first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies,” won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Sze grew up in Boston. Her father, who is of Chinese descent, is an architect; her mother, of Anglo-Irish descent, is a retired schoolteacher. Sze graduated from Yale in 1991. In 1995, she enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, in Manhattan, and her work promptly attracted notice. In 1999, Sze was invited to create a show for the ground floor of the Fondation Cartier, in Paris. One of Sze’s most ambitious works is called “Things Fall Apart,” and it is now in the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Like the Fondation Cartier work, it was a methodical maelstrom, but it upped the ante by appearing to defy gravity even as it descended a stairway of several stories into the museum’s atrium. Its central element was a cherry-red Jeep Cherokee split into four parts. Richard Serra believes that Sze “is changing the potential of sculpture.” Mentions Robert Rauschenberg. The polychrome mobiles of Alexander Calder are perhaps the most obvious forerunners to Sze’s work. In her universe, inanimate objects take on a life of their own. This is especially true of a project installed, through midsummer, on a stretch of the High Line. “Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat),” as the piece is called, is a modular swarm of polished-steel-and-faux-wood geometries, bisected by the promenade, that also functions as a feeder for birds and butterflies. The work was recently voted the best public project of 2011 by the International Association of Art Critics.
