Boston-born and New York–based artist Sarah Sze (Born 1969 in Boston) explores the peripheries of the built environment and our increasingly image saturated world through everyday materials in her ambitious paintings, sculptures, and installations. In Surround Sound (After Studio), Sze continues to build upon her longstanding interest in merging art with built space through a personal investigation of the artist’s studio. In 2019, Sze presented a room-size installation that replicated her studio through layered cardboard, folding chairs, a ladder, and blue-taped images on standard printer paper. Surround Sound (After Studio) was presented within this installation, connecting the artist’s painting practice to the expansive and mediated space of the studio. “After” is often used in titles of copies that reference another artist’s work, but, here, Sze “copies” her own studio in a two-dimensional painting that considers the ways in which the studio space shapes paintings. Sze layers images of speakers, Post-it notes, and mirrored surfaces to construct the complex pictorial space that defines Surround Sound (After Studio), which stands over eight feet high and combines a vast array of media. As in her sculptures and installations, Sze resists a singular perspective and conveys a sense of ongoing construction before the viewer’s eyes. In Surround Sound (After Studio), Sze evokes the layered, sensorial, and reflective space of the artist’s studio and the contemporary world writ large through a refracted surface that captures the unique sonic, physical, and aesthetic space of the artist’s studio.