Installation Artist Picked for Venice 2013

Sarah Sze, the installation artist known for creating site-specific environments out of everyday objects like toothpicks, sponges, light bulbs and plastic bottles, has been chosen to represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Ms. Sze，43, was selected by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which promotes cultural exchanges worldwide. Holly Block, director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Carey Lovelace, a critic and independent curator, proposed Ms. Sze for the Biennale, and those two women will organize the exhibition together, with the Bronx Museum acting as the commissioning institution.

Ms. Sze’s work has been visible in New York for a while. A show of her works on paper is at the Asia Society through March 25. And those strolling the High Line can see her modern avian habitat — fake-wood-covered birdhouses with parallelogram sides built into grids of shiny metal rods that converge to single points.

“Her work is so sensitive to its surroundings I will be fascinated to see how she transforms the American pavilion without physically changing the architecture,” said Ms. Lovelace, who explained that she and Ms. Block have watched Ms. Sze’s work evolve for years.

Ms. Sze said she would create a sequence of environments inside the pavilion, a 1930s Palladian-style structure designed by Delano & Aldrich, and in the courtyard in front of it. The installation, called “Triple Point,” will be about “orientation and disorientation,” Ms. Sze said in a telephone interview.

“I plan to create a new commission in the courtyard that brings the inside out,” she added. “Wandering around Venice without a map, you find the most incredible things. And I’m hoping to create an immersive environment that deals with that abstract experience of discovery.”

Ms. Sze’s work has been shown at the Venice Biennale before. She showed in an exhibition there in 1998. This time around, she said, she will probably spend about two months in Venice, creating her installation with help from Italian university students. “My work is always a mix of stuff collected over time and all over the place,” she explained. Venice is an especially rich hunting ground, she said, adding that she expects to use local materials and local craftspeople.

Ms. Lovelace and Ms. Block said that the project would be documented as it unfolded, with live streaming on a Web site that would be accessible through the Bronx Museum.

Those sexy blondes Roy Lichtenstein depicted in the 1960s never seem to age. Whenever one of the paintings comes up for sale, a bevy of rich suitors tend to fight over it.

That’s what Sotheby’s is hoping will happen on May 9 when it auctions “Sleeping Girl,” one of Lichtenstein’s seminal comic-book images, which he painted in 1964. Because its owners, the Los Angeles collectors Beatrice and Phil Gersh, were said to have loved the painting so much they didn’t want to part with it, the couple only lent it once, to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, in 1989-90.

Mr. Gersh, a philanthropist and founder of a talent agency, died in 2004, and his wife, Beatrice, a life trustee of the Museum of Contemporary Art and a noted collector, died in October. Now the painting, which the couple bought for $1,000 from the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles the year it was made, is expected to sell for $30 million to $40 million.

“All of Lichtenstein’s other girls have been traded over the years,” said Tobias Meyer, director of Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide. “This is one of the last Pop icons that has remained in the same collection, and collectors have been waiting for it.”

The image of a classic American beauty with flowing blond hair, sensuous red lips, her eyes closed, is from one of Lichtenstein’s comic-book series, although experts are not sure of the exact source of this woman. “It has such a cinematic quality to it,” Mr. Meyer said, “that it looks like a film still.”

Whether “Sleeping Girl” will break the record price for the artist at auction is anyone’s guess. The sales price would have to top $43.2 million, the record set at Christie’s in November for “I Can See the Whole Room! ... and There’s Nobody in It!,” a black canvas from 1961 with a man’s face peering through a peephole.

Video- and audio-based artworks have been kicking around since the 1960s, which makes them virtually archaic to many of today’s young artists. But these relics are an important a part of art history. A new initiative at the Museum of Modern Art — which has been collecting and preserving these works since they were made — will eventually allow its holdings of more than 1,400 works by 400 artists to be available to the public.

This week the museum began the first phase of what it is calling its Media Lounge. Designed by the New York artist Renée Green, the space consists of flexible environments for individual or group viewings. The museum’s second floor has three viewing stations, where a selection of videos can be seen on the kind of monitors originally meant to show them. By May or June, MoMA officials said, they hope to add six more viewing structures and additional newer videos, including some intended for display on flat-screen monitors. There will also be listening stations for audio works. By August or September the museum hopes to expand the project to 14 viewing stations.