Remembering Richard Serra, the Giant of Contemporary Steel Sculpture

One of the most celebrated artists of post-war America, Richard Serra, died on March 26th, 2024, at the age of 85 in his home in Orient, New York. Primarily known for his monumental steel sculptures, Serra belonged to a generation of artists who brought a new visual language based on experiments with form, materials, and space. 

Interested in the processes of sculpture, Serra designed works that invite deeper, experiential engagement between viewers, sculptures, and the surrounding space. His most famous pieces comprise rolled steel plates positioned in different shapes without the help of bolts, welds, or screws. In his early experimentations, he splashed molten lead onto corners of rooms and placed steel objects precariously against one another. His monumental pieces contain all the mystery of ancient sacred sites, only with religious sentiment substituted with an awe of the space. 

His approach was new in sculpture; walking and circling around and between his spatial compositions gave viewers an active position, forging 'peripatetic perception,' which invited deeper contemplation. 

As the Guggenheim's tribute on Instagram states, Serra "reshaped our perceptions of space and form and redefined the connection between viewer and artwork." 

Beyond the sheer scale and grandeur of his creations, Serra's artistic vision was rooted in a deep understanding of the relationship between art, architecture, and the environment.

The Practice of Richard Serra

Born in San Francisco in 1938, Richard Serra lived and worked in New York. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he obtained a BA in English Literature, and later on got a BFA and MFA in painting from Yale University. During his studies in Santa Barbara, Serra worked in steel mills to support himself and, after finishing his degrees at Yale, worked with Josef Albers on the book The Interaction of Color (1963). During the early 1960s, he also came into contact with several leading modernists, including Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella.

His presentation on the US scene came in 1968, when he started exhibiting with Leo Castelli, and had his first solo exhibition in the country a year later at Leo Castelli Warehouse. His first solo museum exhibition happened in 1970 at the Pasadena Art Museum in California. 

Serra participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions both locally and internationally, including Documenta, Venice Biennale, and Whitney Annuals and Biennials. In 2007, a large retrospective of his work was staged at MoMA. 

He also received numerous awards for his work, such as the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale (2001), J. Paul Getty Medal (2018), and the highest national awards for art from Germany (Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste), France (Chevalier de l'Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur), and Spain (Orden de las Artes y las Letras de España). 

Exploring Sculpture 

In the mid-1960s, Serra received a fellowship from Yale to travel to Paris and, a year later, a Fulbright grant for Florence. While in Paris, he started to move away from painting and almost daily visited Brancusi's reconstructed studio where he studied the Romanian artist's simplified forms. His definitive break from painting came after he visited Madrid and saw Velazquez's Las Meninas. As he stated later, this marked a turning point for him. 

"I thought there was no possibility of me getting close to that. Cézanne hadn't stopped me, de Kooning and Pollock hadn't stopped me, but Velazquez seemed like a bigger thing to deal with."

His first solo exhibition happened outside of the US, in Rome in 1966 at Galleria La Salita, and a year later, the artist decided to move to New York, where he became friends with a group of artists, including Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Robert Smithson. Although Serra is commonly associated with Minimalists, he was closer to the Post-Minimalist generation, which introduced new formats, such as performance, conceptual, video, land, and process art. 

The interaction with this group influenced Serra, who also started experimenting with forms and materials. His first sculptures made of non-traditional materials such as fiberglass and rubber date back to 1966, and from 1968 to 1970, he also executed a number of Splash pieces, made of molten lead he threw in rooms between floor and wall. 

In 1969, he began his famous Prop sculptures, made of individual rolls of lead combined without welding or attaching. The innovative approach of constructing sculptures by relying solely on balancing, weight, and gravity brought him a place in the exhibition Nine Young Artists: Theodoron Awards at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1969.

Serra's works reveal both his interest in Minimalism, through the austerity of forms, which is sometimes betrayed by 'torqued' shapes that recall baroque whirlwind aesthetics, as are his pieces for the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Following his Prop series, he began experimenting with hot-rolled steel, for which he would become famous. As he explained, artists avoided steel and "did not deal with its tectonic potential, its weight, its compression, its mass, its stasis — that wasn't knowledge that was in the art world."

His early steel pieces relied on the aesthetics of Props but were visually different. The first steel-plate piece Serra exhibited was Strike, from 1971, and at the 1972 Documenta, he showed Circuit. Soon after, he started using curved plates that could be self-supporting if tilted, which became the staple of his art. 

Serra was also interested in video art and produced numerous short films during his six-decade career. In 1970, he also helped Smithson create his famous Spiral Jetty, and, after Smithson's death in 1973, helped complete Amarillo Ramp in Texas. 

Richard Serra: Equal

Public Works

Richard Serra created many public sculptures over the course of his career in the US, Europe, and beyond. In 1982, he installed the controversial Tilted Arc, a 120-foot-long sculpture, at Federal Plaza in New York. Eight years later, however, the work was dismantled following complaints over the work's impact on the pedestrian movement, with people having to circumvent the sculpture in order to cross the plaza. Nonetheless, the work epitomized his approach of engaging with viewers instead of making pieces to be admired from afar.

In the following decades, Serra was commissioned to create numerous works for both indoor and outdoor spaces worldwide. In Missouri, his sculpture park serves as an outdoor gallery featuring eight thick steel panels, and in New Zealand, his Te Tuhirangi Contour cuts through the landscape as a huge ribbon. 

Among large-scale public works from the later decades are Matter of Time (1994-2005), Serra's sculpture series comprising eight pieces, which was permanently installed in 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, and the site-specific installation Promenade for Monumenta 2008 exhibition. Opposite the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, another large-scale Serra's creation can be seen since 2011. 

In his later years, Serra became involved in major public projects in Qatar, including the four steel plates rising 14 meters in the air and spanning more than a kilometre west of Doha, installed in 2014 and titled East-West/West-East. The work engages its surroundings, the desert landscape, bringing a monolith solid form to its shifting character. Serra described it as "the most fulfilling thing" he's ever done. 

The Legacy of Richard Serra

Represented by the Gagosian Gallery for many decades, Richard Serra transformed our understanding of arts, and in particular sculpture, but also changed the way we see and experience space, form, and the sublime. Following the news of Serra's passing, Larry Gagosian said: "Richard leaves a legacy of extraordinary care and empathy that we are not likely to see again." 

One of the giants of 20th-century art, Serra helped change the understanding of the role of art and its relation to people, foregrounding formal experimentation imbued with a deep understanding of the world and our relation to it. Instead of creating works to be observed from a distance, he put the human figure at the centre of his intentions, building his sculptural forms in relation to it. 

Featured image: The view of artist Richard Serra's Wake, 2004, on site at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, via Adam Fagen