NEW HAVEN, CONN.- The Yale University Art Gallery presents Sarah Sze: Images in Translation. Curated by Keely Orgeman, the Gallery’s Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, this focused exhibition highlights the work of New York–based artist Sarah Sze (born 1969; B.A. 1991), featuring new paintings publicly displayed for the first time.

Sze has become widely known for works that challenge the static nature of painting and sculpture by blending these art forms and incorporating aspects of other media, particularly drawing, installation, photography, printmaking, and video. The Gallery’s exhibition brings together her new paintings with an earlier, room-size sculpture to consider the points at which the two categories of Sze’s work diverge and converge. Both integrate imagery drawn from popular and personal sources, including scenes from her own studio—one method among many that she uses to break down the hierarchies associated with artistic creation. Immersed in works that evoke the physical space and perspective of the artist, viewers are invited to see themselves as participants in the processes of image making, echoing their everyday experiences in today’s digitally overloaded environment.

Trained as a painter, Sze initially focused on infusing the language of painting into sculpture in the late 1990s and early 2000s before returning to a two-dimensional format in 2018. Her paintings are sculptural, however, conceived as spaces that can be entered visually rather than physically. With their built-up surfaces of acrylic, oil, paper, and tape, as well as the subtle evocation of a landscape, they reveal her methods of constructing depth, both actual and illusory. She begins every painting by applying the largest elements to the panels and then layering progressively smaller forms, which are further transformed through various actions—pasting, scuffing, scraping, tearing—until they coalesce into a seemingly fragile whole. Though experienced in public, the paintings offer access to private moments that remain palpably connected to the artist through their imagery and the processes involved in their creation.

In 2019, around the time that Sze initiated her practice of layering paint and collage materials, she showed a group of new paintings and sculptures in a solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, in New York. Among the works on view was Images in Translation (2019), a sprawling and interconnected mass of technical equipment, boxes, stools, tripods, papers, and cords, with videos projected onto surrounding surfaces. In this sculptural installation, clusters of disparate items are arranged to resemble an unoccupied studio—not abandoned but maintained in a state of buzzing, automated activity. Projections of flickering light, which appear alongside scenes that echo the sense of interiority in her paintings, stretch the work’s dimensional footprint while establishing its time-bound quality; all the digital equipment must be synchronized for their outputs to align. The result is a video made up of “blanks,” Sze’s term for the images that have been blacked out by passing through her apparatus.

Sarah Sze: Images in Translation pairs the eponymous 2019 sculpture with paintings made in 2026. Together, they elaborate on the concerns and questions that have persisted in the artist’s ongoing experimentation with images, their views into exterior and interior worlds functioning as “portals” (to use Sze’s term) that expand one’s sense of time and space through the activation of memory and imagination. Installed within a single gallery, the exhibition builds on previous shows that grouped two or more of Sze’s related works to point to their conceptual and visual dialogue, in this case investigating the production, consumption, transience, and materiality of imagery in contemporary culture.

Born in Boston, Sze earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1991 and an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1997. After presenting her first solo institutional exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1999, she steadily gained an international reputation with the inclusion of her work at the Venice Biennale and the Carnegie International in 1999, the Whitney Biennial in 2000, and the S�o Paulo Biennial in 2002. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. In 2013 Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale and since then has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums across the world. She has also received several major commissions, two of which will be unveiled in fall 2026, coinciding with the Gallery’s exhibition: one at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, and the other at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.