MUNICH.- For the fifth edition of Der Öffentlichkeit - Von Den Freunden Haus der Kunst American artist Sarah Sze created “Centrifuge”, a new site-specific installation that radically transforms visitors’ perception and experience of the museum’s Middle Hall.

“Centrifuge” commences at a fixed point. Sze has carefully organized constructed and off-the-shelf objects into a series of sculptural groupings. These objects, arranged around the installation’s centre, recall subatomic particles morphing and evolving within a quantum field, while also mimicking the transmutation of cells and organisms within biological life.

Arranged as agglomerations, the material dynamically morphs outwards into the surrounding space, literally exploding the perceptual field within the Middle Hall. Yet, the installation seems to be caught between growth and decay. It functions as a projector, illuminating the ceiling and activating the surrounding architecture with flickering movement.

Sarah Sze succeeds in giving the room its own temperature, even its “own weather.” The artist observes, “Your sense of smell, your sense of touch, taste, everything would be slightly heightened perhaps. How do you make someone's senses shift? How to create a piece that somehow creates a weather over everything? We know that we're in a room, that the temperature here is all that matters actually.”

Awarded annually by Haus der Kunst, the commission Der Öffentlichkeit addresses a generation of artists, who have developed a clear and challenging line of artistic inquiry, and who have demonstrated models of artistic excellence at a certain stage in their careers and who promise further potential and successful development. The aim is to identify artists as outstanding examples within an international art discourse. The series was launched in 2012.

The Middle Hall serves as a public plaza where visitors can sit and read, meet each other, or simply linger. It is a public hub, from which additional exhibition spaces, the bookstore and the Archive Gallery are accessible; it also serves as a passageway to the café “Goldene Bar,” the terrace and the Collection Goetz presentation. The commissioned works are designed to address the concept of the public in a complex way and to preserve the permeability of the Middle Hall. Sarah Szes's installation unfolds in the space as an intimate, captivating field of magnetic attraction, in which scale, power and time transform.

Sarah Sze was born in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, and lives and works in New York. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Yale University (1991), and her Master of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts (1997). Soon afterwards she developed a lively exhibition activity. In 2013, she represented the USA at the Venice Biennial. Institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Fondation Cartier have purchased her works. She has created public works for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the High Line and the Public Art Fund in New York. In 2016, she designed the 96th Street subway station for New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. Phaidon honored her work with a monograph in 2015 as part of the series on contemporary artists.

Curated by Okwui Enwezor with Damian Lentini