In Memoriam: Richard Serra
Acclaimed American sculptor Richard Serra passed away on March 26, 2024. I’m celebrating the artist’s life with a selection of images of his works and some videos that allow us to experience the monumental three dimensional works more fully than is possible from still photos. Of course, there is no substitute for encountering a work of art in person and I encourage you to seize any chance to do so that comes your way.
I consider space to be a material. The articulation of space has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct. — Richard Serra
Richard Serra, born in 1938, grew up in the Bay Area where his father worked in the shipbuilding industry. An experience as a child, when his father took 5-year-old Richard to watch the launching of a new ship, had a deep impact on the future artist. He was astonished by the transformation of the massive metal construction into a buoyant ship afloat on the ocean. For much of his career, the artist explored the interaction of weight and space and the manner in which the introduction of a sculpture into a space reorients the space and the viewer’s response to both artwork and space.
I was in graduate school when the controversy over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc hit the headlines. As you can see from the photo above, the work was 12 feet tall and 120 feet long and stretched across the busy Federal Plaza in New York City. The brouhaha over the work can be attributed to the Minimalist nature of the sculpture, its obstruction of pedestrian traffic in a busy public space, and the feeling of many users of the space that their needs had not been considered. In 1989, the sculpture was removed and destroyed, outraging the artist. I sympathized with the artist’s feeling but also wonder what else could have been done. The work, like many of Serra’s sculptures, was site-specific, meaning that everything about its design — from its proportions and scale to its shape and arc — was based on its intended location in the Federal Plaza. In spite of the problems surrounding Tilted Arc, Serra continued to produce massive sculptures for indoor and outdoor settings and in public and private sites.
Not all of Serra’s work was massive. He explored a variety of industrial materials in smaller works, perhaps influenced by the Arte Povera movement in Europe which he visited in 1964.
Though smaller in scale than Tilted Arc or Band (2006, above), works like One Ton Prop (House of Cards), explore weight and balance as much as the larger pieces. The Prop and Lean series use plates, tubes, and blocks of weighty materials to challenge our expectations of what is possible using these materials.
Though most of Serra’s works are rightly thought of as Minimalist works, he has also been associated with the Process Art movement, in which the final work is wholly dependent on specific techniques (processes) the artist has devised. In this video we see Serra and a crew of workers at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at work on Gutter Corner Splash- Night Shift and then the resulting sculpture.
An example of Serra’s outdoor work is this enormous sculpture located in New Zealand, a sinuous wall almost 20 feet tall (6 meters) and over 275 yards long (252 meters).
One of Serra’s more complex sculptural suites was installed at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain in 2005. The Matter of Time consists of 8 works joined into a grouping designed for a specific gallery in the Frank Gehry designed museum. All constructed of weathered steel, the parts are Torqued Spiral (Closed Open Closed Open Closed), 2003; Torqued Ellipse, 2003-4; Double Torqued Ellipse, 2003-4; Snake, 3 units, each comprised of 2 conical sections, 1994-1997; Torqued Steel, 2003-4; Torqued Spiral (Open Left Closed Right), 2003-4; Between the Torus and the Sphere, 4 torus and 4 spherical sections, 2003-2005; and Blind Spot Reversed, 3 torus and 3 spherical sections, 2003-2005.
Everything we choose in life for its lightness soon reveals its unbearable weight. — Richard Serra
In Serra’s sculptures from the Equal Weight, Unequal Measure series, the artist explores the contrast of size and weight. This grouping was installed in a custom-built structure on the campus of Glenstone, a museum in Potomac, Maryland.
Though I had seen photographs and videos of Richard Serra’s sculptures, I hadn’t experienced one in person until the Summer of 2016. Then I encountered two in a single trip! Though I was planning to see Sequence in San Francisco, imagine my surprise when I encountered Tilted Spheres in the Toronto airport. Though our schedule was tight, we had a few minutes to enjoy the way that light and sound were altered by the metal walls and to watch two small boys who were excited by the strange environment they had encountered.
I had been intrigued by Serra and his work from those news stories about Tilted Arc, but when I was able to spend an extended period exploring Sequence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I was completely captivated. The changing shape of the interior space, the effect of the enclosure on sound, the soft-looking rusted surfaces of the metal walls were fascinating. Even sitting up on the benches beside the gallery, wonderful effects of light and shadow kept the sculpture changing.
This concludes my look at the art of Richard Serra, in remembrance of his long, fruitful career.
Play is a necessary ingredient in art because there is a kind of wonder that goes on when you play. You’re directing your activity toward a conclusion that isn’t prescribed by a particular method. — Richard Serra
Wonderful post, a great tribute to a great artist. The experience of seeing (and sometimes walking through) his art is like no other. I was fascinated to learn from you about his childhood experience of shipbuilding. When thinking about his work, this makes so much sense as an influence. I was also interested to see that San Francisco has a set of Torqued Ellipses. There is also a set at Dia:Beacon, in Beacon, New York. Those are the works I have been able to walk through—quite amazing and a little terrifying, at first!
It is awful that Serra’s New York City work was destroyed, rather than moved elsewhere. It was not a good choice of location, given the pedestrian flow in that area, but why could it not, for example, have been moved to a place like Storm King, in the Hudson Valley? Such a terrible shame. Storm King is a wonderful place, and a beautiful setting for outdoor sculpture. There is a Serra piece there, too. https://collections.stormking.org/Browse/entities
I know I'm an old curmudgeon, I did not see anything I liked at all.