From 1 to 22 September the two floors of the Victoria Miro gallery in Islington - warehouse-like both in scale and in finish - were the site of installations by the American artist Sarah Sze. They were gathered under two titles: A Certain Slant and Tilting Planet. She has recently shown in Sweden and, over the last ten years, in America, Germany and France as well as in Britain.

Sze's is an art of arrangement. At first glance, across the wide floors of the gallery, these installations suggest models of cities dominated by high downtown buildings and surrounded by sprawling suburbs, or of landscapes where mountains slope down to a plain. The largest pieces spread out from the corners as though they had been swept there by the eddies of a strong wind. As you get closer, things fall into legible patterns, rather as the grid of streets and meanders of a river do on the descent to a city airport. It is on this scale, on the closer view, that the imaginative ingenuity with which Sze transforms the commonplace objects she orders into stacks, lines and arrays becomes apparent.

LRB 4 October 2007 | PDF Download