Sarah Sze “Fallen Sky”
To inaugurate the permanent, site-specific sculpture Fallen Sky by artist Sarah Sze (b. 1969, Boston, US), Storm King will present a new exhibition of the same name. The exhibition will flow from two indoor gallery spaces in Storm King’s 1935 Normandy-style Museum Building out into the landscape beyond, leading the visitor from the exhibition towards an overlook to Storm King’s breathtaking south expanse, and to the site of the 36-foot-round Fallen Sky, framed by the mountains beyond. The exhibition will take landscape as its subject—not a depiction of landscape, but rather a consideration of landscape in varying states—from growth to entropy. In the interior exhibition gallery, Sze will consider landscapes' ability to extend indoor space into the outdoors. In an exploration of painting's ability to create and expand walls into portals, Sze will install a large-scale series of wall panels that have been painted, printed, and collaged to create a feeling of recession into deep space. Playing with the physical interpretation of landscape itself, the artist will incorporate the plants used in the landscaping of Fallen Sky, as well as materials and debris from making the permanent work, showing the creative process itself as a system of development and demise. To experience this exhibition is to enter another world.
Storm King Senior Curator Nora Lawrence said, “In a time of pandemic, visitors come to Storm King to be outdoors, and this exhibition will bring the outdoors into the interior, literally by throwing open paneled doors and extending the installation through these doors, spilling outside into nature. In creating this installation, Sarah Sze will be treating Storm King’s Museum Building not as a set, white-cube exhibition space, but as a found object to be engaged with and acted upon. Landscape will have taken over.”
The sculpture Fallen Sky will consist of a delicate and entropic 36-foot-diameter spherical cavity pressed into the earth and sheathed in mirrored stainless steel. The large scale and shimmering surface of the sculpture will allow it to be seen both up close and from far away across Storm King’s rolling fields. Fallen Sky is Storm King’s first permanent commission in more than a decade, since Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield was completed in 2008. Fallen Sky joins a historic series of site-specific commissions for Storm King’s permanent collection, which also includes works by Andy Goldsworthy, Isamu Noguchi, and Richard Serra, among others.
Press release and images via Storm King Art Center.
Video by Graham Mason.
