Fragile Sculptures By Sarah Sze

Londonist Rating: ★★★☆☆

For galleries with more than one site, it's become en vogue to host an exhibition across different locations so that's what Victoria Miro gallery has done for Sarah Sze — using all three of its spaces in London.

Sze is an artist who uses multiple items to create intricate and often fragile sculptures, many of which can be found in Miro's Mayfair gallery. The delicate forms are made from rudimentary objects such as twigs, cut-out pieces of paper, string and clips. The inclusion of organic material hints at the fragility of life — most obviously in a work where a bird's nest hangs suspended by a counterweight so even the slightest push would knock it to the ground.

The Wharf Road gallery features a much larger assemblage that still manages to maintain a sense of delicacy. It's the perfect size as we fear any larger and it would lose its impact, as we saw in her larger pieces at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Across both galleries Sze has also gathered newspapers from around the world on a certain date and replaced the images with pictures of the night sky. It's never clear what's being conveyed here and the idea of recognising our relative position in the universe feels like an oversimplification.

In the final space on the top floor of Wharf Road lies an array of sculptures resembling rocks and boulders, and screen-prints of photographs of rocks on the wall. The contrast of the delicate with the immovable echoes the themes seen in the smaller sculptures, playing with our perceptions of nature.

These three sets of works across the different spaces are linked by the singular theme of the fragility of life and the natural world around us and, of the three, it's Sze's delicate sculptures that are best at conveying this message.

Sarah Sze is on at Victoria Miro Mayfair, 14 St George Street W1S 1FE until 14 March & Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, N1 7RW until 28 March. Entrance to both exhibitions is free.

For more great art to see in London, visit our top 10 for February.