- Venue
- Victoria Miro
- Location
- London
In a print- and image-saturated world of ever-accelerating art consumption, this show invites you to slow down the viewing experience: an embodied discovery of space, relationships, materiality, time and the elements.
In ‘Calendar Series, July 14-October 16, 2013-15,’ spreads of the New York Times spotlit with reading lamps re-frame the vast stone floor, imposing a library-like reverence as you enter the gallery space. Colour photographs of rock, water, ice, fire and sky replace the original newspaper images. Printed copy is presented in direct relationship to materials placed on top: unfired clay curls, shredded Skinny jeans, rocks, fragments of blue foam – the everyday, and often overlooked, stuff of our lived lives. But in this context, these familiar materials seem charged with a mystical presence that somehow holds my attention. Like a Fischli and Weiss chain reaction, you’re gently enticed from one curious encounter to the next; your journey guided by the process of embodied looking. Trained in architecture and painting, Sze’s spatial sensitivity, tender attention to detail and confident play with scale feels quietly joyful.
Sze delights in quotidian urban aesthetics: a ramifying sprawl of unashamed wires pitches Barclays-blue against traffic-cone-orange, on a backdrop of angular grit-grey. A still-in-process dandelion defiantly erupts from a discarded khaki jacket.
Still Life With Desk, 2013-15, transforms common office materials (bottled water, sellotape, coffee cups, post-its, pot plants) into what I can only describe as beautiful; sensitively placed, with odd juxtapositions that disobey any structure or logic my mind tries to impose. So, a brown A4-clipboard rests desk-height, lavishly strewn with macramé overspilling the edges; toppling downwards, sprawling across the floor.
Ineffable, this work is a gift, an urban retreat that needs to be experienced to be enjoyed.
