At the end of March, the world of contemporary art said goodbye to Richard Serra, one of the most influential artists of the last century, after his death due to pneumonia. Recognized worldwide for his immense steel sculptures designed for high-traffic spaces, Serra leaves an unavoidable legacy for contemporary culture.
Richard Serra aged 80 in 2019, with his sculpture “Combined and Separated” / Photo: George Etheredge/The New York Times
Routes before the sculpture
Richard Serra was born in 1938, and grew up on the coast of San Francisco, California. In an interview given for a book by Hal Foster, the artist reveals that during his childhood he drew everything around him and saw the technique as a way of gaining his parents’ attention and affection.
Despite his first passion for drawing, Serra went to the University of California to do sports, but a back injury in his freshman year led him to transfer to Santa Barbara, where he graduated in English Literature. It was after being admitted to the Fine Arts course at Yale that his approach to the arts really took place, a period in his life in which Serra won a scholarship to study in Paris.
His experience in the capital of France was essential for expanding his repertoire, and it was where he became more interested in sculpture through Brancusi’s studio reconstructed at the French National Museum of Modern Art. Constantin Brancusi is considered the father of modern sculpture, and Serra revealed that the Romanian artist’s work clicked in his mind, which attracted him daily to draw it.
Richard Serra – Verb List, 1967 Reproduction: MoMA
At the time of his training, Serra was already seeking to distance himself as much as possible from painting techniques – a language initially chosen during his undergraduate studies. In 1966, the artist moved from Europe to New York, already open to experimenting with languages such as video and sculpture with industrial materials, set in a scene influenced by minimalism and abstract expressionism.
Verb List, a 1967 work highlights the conceptual burden present in Serra’s production. On two sheets of paper, the artist writes a series of verbs related to human action on matter. “To open”, “to match”, “to mix”, “to erase”, among others, summarize the artist’s interest in process – one of the keys to understanding his poetics.
In the last years of the 1960s, the artist created a series of works with lead, exploring the force of gravity, and the relationship of the sculpture with its bases – such as the floor, the wall, or even the self-support of its various parts.
Richard Serra – One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969 / Reproduction: MoMA
In the book October Files (2000), Rosalind Krauss draws attention to the work One Ton Prop (House of Cards), from 1969, in which Serra keeps 4 lead plates upright through the reciprocity of their supported sides. At that time, the artist considered various forces such as weight and gravity to understand the behavior of matter when designing his works. The process was more important because it was based on experimentation, and it had to be evident to viewers while these works were displayed.
The relationship between sculpture and the human body occurs in various aspects, whether using it as a formal reference, or even considering the experience between object and body. In the 1970s, Serra began to create large-scale sculptures with special importance given to the space occupied by the project. By designing sculptures taking into account the specificities of spaces, the artist sought to reveal potential experiences hidden in these environments.
Richard Serra – Circuit, 1972 Reproduction: MoMA
In Circuit, from 1972, the artist inserted four iron sheets measuring 2.4m high and 7.3m long each in a quadrangular room, with their extension starting from the corners towards the center, leaving a small space for circulation between them. . By reconfiguring the room, viewers could only fully understand the space from the central point. With little circulation space and a very limited field of vision, the artist challenged visitors and their psychological capabilities of spatial reading, clearly an intention with his large-scale projects.
Movement and choreography are also striking elements in Serra’s creative process when thinking about spatiality. By taking his works to spaces with high circulation, such as squares and public gardens, the artist raised the discussion around the relationships between art, society, public and private space. For the artist, thinking about the movement of bodies in contact with his works was a constant task, especially in large-scale works.
Richard Serra – Tilted Arc1981 Photo: Anne Chauvet/reproduction
Tilted Arc, from 1981, is one of Serra’s most emblematic works. After going through a public commission, the artist planned a site-specific work for two years for Federal Plaza, a square in New York. Surrounded by government buildings, the square had a large circulation of public and corporate employees.
Serra’s final design was a COR-TEN steel plate measuring 3.6m high and 36.5m long, with a curvature opposite to the curvilinear pattern of the square’s floor. The large sculpture was installed and had a major impact on the square’s landscape, blocking part of the view of the fountain and requiring pedestrians to go around it, depending on their intended route.
Being a site specific work, it is understood that the work would only make sense installed in that space, under those conditions. However, given the magnitude and repercussion of the project, a legal battle was fought, as a result of which some people who worked around it demanded the removal of the work, which ended up occurring on March 15, 1989.
Removing the viewer from their passive and contemplative posture is one of the aspects that attract attention when faced with proposals such as Tilted Arc. A work designed for public space can be thought of in other terms when talking about harmony, conviviality, aesthetics, materiality. Serra explored the limits of sculpture, of monumental materiality, starting from industrial processes that also took their specificities into account, such as the production of a steel sheet so large that only his country would have the technology for such a feat.
Richard Serra – East-West/West-East, 2014 Foto: Cristiano Mascaro
Always taking into account the dialogue between work, space and architecture, public and circulation and properties of materials, Serra’s work reached different places around the world. An example is East-West/West-East, work from 2014, commissioned for the Qatar desert, composed of 4 steel sheets aligned and spaced at irregular intervals. With difficult access, this work differs from others installed in places that are part of many people’s daily lives. To access it, a drive of more than forty miles from Doha, the capital of Qatar, is required.
In 2019, the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) inaugurated the first permanent work by Richard Serra installed in a space in Latin America. The public that accesses the São Paulo headquarters of the Institute on Avenida Paulista comes across the work Echo, made up of two 18.6m high steel plates, weighing 70.5 tonnes each. Developed to dialogue with the architecture of the IMS, the height and axes of the signs in relation to the building were designed to create a feeling of imbalance in the visitors’ journey.
Although the monumental nature of Serra’s work draws attention upon first contact, this is not the main reason why his production has become a landmark in sculpture and contemporary art as a whole. The commitment to reflection on experience and incessant research into the materials he worked on made Serra a master of his craft. Thinking about sculpture through its physical relationships with the forces that constantly act on matter, they allowed the public to also see the way in which the body relates to these other bodies and spaces. Between simplicity and the monumental, there is a place that Serra leaves in the history of art.
References:
Richard Serra / edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes ; essays by Benjamin H.D.
Buchloh . . . [et al.].p. cm. — (October files). 2000. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, England.
Richard Serra and Hal Foster. Conversations about sculpture. 2018. Yale University Press New Haven and London.
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