Sarah Sze’s Guggenheim Takeover Considers Time in all Dimensions

“For me, art is the greatest of all time travelers,” says New York-based installation artist Sarah Sze, whose whole-of-museum solo exhibition Timelapse opens at the Guggenheim on March 31. Whether one is looking at an ancient work of art or one created just yesterday, the artist explains, you are in a dialogue with another person, another intellect, the time distance between you becoming ever more irrelevant. Sze, 54, is a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and one half of New York’s most glamorous couple: her husband is Siddhartha Mukherjee, the oncologist, scientist, and author of The Emperor of All Maladies and, most recently, The Song of the Cell.

It is the notion of time in all of its dimensions that Sze explores in her highly anticipated exhibition. The opening salvo of Sze’s show is a montage of images projected on the exterior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic building that will mirror in real time the cycle of the Moon over the course of the exhibition. “Like the collective efforts used by humans over centuries to communally mark time, to measure and mark it in physical form — ranging from Jantar Mantar, to the Prime Meridian line, to ubiquitous minarets, clock towers, and animated or astronomical clocks around the world — the museum building,” says Sze, “will become a site to explore the idea of a public clock, and an experiment in collective timekeeping that all in the city can experience.”

Inside, the artist will be filling the Guggenheim rotunda with myriad intricate site-specific installations that incorporate painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and video — each a meditation on “how our experience of time and place is continuously reshaped in relationship to the constant stream of objects, images, and information in today’s digitally and materially saturated world.” Among the highlights, the Guggenheim’s own “Timekeeper,” 2016, a multichannel color video installation, with sound, mirrors, archival pigment prints, and a host of utilitarian objects.

“Whether an intimately scaled sculpture or a large, permanent public commission,” says exhibition curator Kyung An, “her works possess a generative quality—as though in a cycle of growth and decay—and dynamically engage with the spaces they occupy.”

Sarah Sze: Timelapse runs March 31–September 10 at the Guggenheim. Click here for more information.