Sculpture, Reimagined: A Look into Sarah Sze’s Seamless

As visitors walk into Room 11 of Tate Modern’s Materials and Objects display, they are faced with bright blue plastic pots, red pliers, magnifying glasses, construction tools, tiny wooden bridges and ladders, silver office lamps, and tangled wires, all floating above the gallery floor. Upon seeing this image, they may remember the boards from the I SPY game they played as children. Sarah Sze’s installation captivates its viewers, who are left curious as they try to reconcile childhood nostalgia with the futuristic nature of the work.

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The 1999 sculpture, Seamless, dominates the exhibition space, as it is suspended from the gallery’s ceiling and attached to its empty walls, at times even penetrating these walls to expose the structure of the building. The sculpture’s bright patches of color and intricate composition are juxtaposed with the flat white walls of the museum, and yet the work is not incongruous to its setting; it acts as a brushstroke that sweeps across this three-dimensional canvas, connecting the walls physically and architecturally in a way that is uniquely “seamless.” In fact, after it was first shown in Pittsburgh in 1999, Seamless was reconfigured to fit the exact dimensions of the London gallery where it can now be found. Sze noted that its title took on a new meaning as it was placed at the “seam” of the two Tate Modern buildings. 

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A closer look into Sze’s Seamless

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Seamless is a delicate network of everyday objects. It incorporates tools along with the constructions Sze has made with them: a small bridge made out of matchsticks is displayed along with the pliers, ladder, and spirit level that were used to create it and connect it to the rest of the piece. Sze combines the human scale of her tools and the miniature scale of her creations in a single construction, a single process. Her sculpture evokes the double helix structure of DNA as it seemingly grows and reproduces to infinity, resembling something not just of art, but of life. Sze evokes the delicacy of the human experience and its inextricable connection to the physical space, a duality that she nods to as she explains her approach to sculpture: the gallery label for Seamless includes a quote from Sze, who says that sculpture “plays with things such as space, touch, location, intimacy, and memory... the way in which we experience movement... and the resulting revelation of specific moments in time that only physical space can create.”

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Sze’s bricolage challenges the nature and conventions of sculpture through its physical elements. Seamless is all-encompassing yet airy and intangible, unpredictable yet natural and structured, chaotic yet fluid. But the work also challenges notions about art: Sze reimagines the readymade, the term coined by pioneering conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp (creator of the famous 1917 Fountain) who made works of art from already manufactured objects. Displaying her tools as part of a continuous process of production, growth, and life, Sze assigns to them a meaning beyond physical appearance. They are no longer objects but indispensable components to her concept and her space. And they exist beyond this space as they break through the walls of the room. As she extends her piece beyond the exhibition space, Sze suggests the boundlessness of human possibility, one which we cannot fully see or know.

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Judith Rothchild, Untitled Composition, 1945, on display at Tate Modern, London

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Seamless is displayed in a room that is otherwise empty, save for Judith Rothchild’s Untitled Composition (1945), a painting inspired by the Dutch modernist movement De Stijl. The movement is recognizable for its bold and geometric application of primary colors—the same ones that stand out in Sze’s work. Both the painting and Sze’s installation are bright, abstract, and fluid, though perhaps irregular to some. The painting may be seen as both the starting point and the continuation of the installation, which, as it moves across the room, evokes the cyclical process of reproduction. With her installation, Sze blurs the boundaries between the past and the present, the two-dimensional and the sculptural, the established and the controversial. She uses space to convey and subvert notions of art, ultimately making it all appear “seamless.”

Sze’s sculpture is part of the ongoing Materials and Objects display at Tate Modern. Those interested in visiting may find more information on the Tate Modern website.