Richard Serra
Richard Serra was an American artist known for his large-scale abstract sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings, and whose work has been primarily associated with postminimalism. Described as "one of his era's greatest sculptors", Serra became notable for emphasizing the material qualities of his works and exploration of the relationship between the viewer, the work, and the site.
Serra pursued English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, before shifting to visual art. He graduated with a B.A. in English literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1961, where he met influential muralists Rico Lebrun and Howard Warshaw. Supporting himself by working in steel mills, Serra's early exposure to industrial materials influenced his artistic trajectory. He continued his education at Yale University, earning a B.A. in art history and an M.F.A. degree in 1964. While in Paris on a Yale fellowship in 1964, he befriended composer Philip Glass and explored Constantin Brâncuși's studio, both of which had a strong influence on his work. His time in Europe also catalyzed his subsequent shift from painting to sculpture.
From the mid-1960s onward, particularly after his move to New York City in 1966, Serra worked to radicalize and extend the definition of sculpture beginning with his early experiments with rubber, neon, and lead, to his large-scale steel works. His early works in New York, such as To Lift from 1967 and Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up from 1968, reflected his fascination with industrial materials and the physical properties of his chosen mediums. His large-scale works, both in urban and natural landscapes, have reshaped public interactions with art and, at times, were also a source of controversy, such as that caused by his Tilted Arc in Manhattan, New York in 1981. Serra was married to artist Nancy Graves between 1965 and 1970, and Clara Weyergraf between 1981 and his death in 2024.
Early life and education
Serra was born in San Francisco on November 2, 1938, to Tony and Gladys Serra – the second of three sons. His father was Spanish from Mallorca and his mother Gladys was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants from Odessa, USSR. From a young age, he was encouraged to draw by his mother and he carried a small notebook for his sketches. His mother would introduce her son as "Richard the artist." His father worked as a pipe fitter for a shipyard near San Francisco.Serra recounted a memory of a visit to the shipyard to see a boat launch when he was four years old. He watched as the ship transformed from an enormous weight to a buoyant, floating structure and noted, "All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory." Serra's father, who was related to the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, later worked as a candy plant foreman.
Richard Serra studied English literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1957 before transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara and graduating in 1961 with a BA in English Literature. In Santa Barbara, Serra met the muralists, Rico Lebrun and Howard Warshaw. Both were in the Art Department and took Serra under their wing. During this period, Serra worked in steel mills to earn a living, as he did at various times from ages 16–25.
Serra studied painting at Yale University and graduated with both a BA in art history and an MFA degree in 1964. Fellow Yale alumni contemporaneous to Serra include Chuck Close, Rackstraw Downs, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, and Robert Mangold. At Yale Serra met visiting artists from the New York School including Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella. Serra taught a color theory course during his last year at Yale and after graduating was asked to help proof Josef Albers's notable color theory book Interaction of Color.
In 1964, Serra was awarded a one-year traveling fellowship from Yale and went to Paris where he met the composer Philip Glass who became a collaborator and long-time friend. In Paris, Serra spent time sketching in Constantin Brâncuși's studio, partially reconstructed inside the Musée national d'Art moderne on the Avenue du Président Wilson, allowing Serra to study Brâncuși's work, later drawing his own sculptural conclusions. An exact replica of Brâncuși's studio is now located opposite the Centre Pompidou. Serra spent 1965 in Florence, Italy on a Fulbright Grant. In 1966 while still in Italy, Serra made a trip to the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain and saw Diego Velázquez's painting Las Meninas. The artist realized he would not surpass the skill of that painting and decided to move away from painting.
While still in Europe, Serra began experimenting with nontraditional sculptural material. He had his first one-person exhibition "Animal Habitats" at Galleria Salita, Rome. Exhibited there were assemblages made with live and stuffed animals which would later be referenced as early work from the Arte Povera movement.
Work
Early work
Serra returned from Europe moving to New York City in 1966. He continued his constructions using experimental materials including rubber, latex, fiberglass, neon, and lead. His Belt Pieces were made with strips of rubber and hung on the wall using gravity as a forming device. Serra combined neon with continuous strips of rubber in his sculpture Belts referencing the serial abstraction in Jackson Pollock's Mural Around that time Serra wrote Verb List a list of transitive verbs which he used as directives for his sculptures. To Lift, and Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up, Splash Piece, and Casting, were some of the action-based works with origins in the verb list. Serra used lead in many of his constructs because of its adaptability. Lead is malleable enough to be rolled, folded, ripped, and melted. With To Lift Serra lifted a 10-foot sheet of rubber off the ground making a free-standing form; with Thirty-five Feet of Lead Rolled Up, Serra, with the help of Philip Glass, unrolled and rolled a sheet of lead as tightly as they could.In 1968 Serra was included in the group exhibition "Nine at Castelli" at Castelli Warehouse in New York where he showed Prop, Scatter Piece, and made Splashing by throwing molten lead against the angle of the floor and wall. In 1969 his piece Casting was included in the exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/''Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art in. In Casting the artist again threw molten lead against the angle of the floor and wall. He then pulled the casting made from the hardened lead away from the wall and repeated the action of splashing and casting creating a series of free-standing forms.
"To prop" is another transitive verb from Serra's "Verb List" utilized by the artist for a series of assemblages of lead plates and poles dependent on leaning and gravity as a force to stay upright. His early Prop Pieces like Prop relied mainly on the wall as a support. Serra wanted to move away from the wall to remove what he thought was a pictorial convention. In 1969 he propped four lead plates up on the floor like a house of cards. The sculpture One Ton Prop: House of Cards weighed 1 ton and the four plates were self-supporting.
Another pivotal moment for Serra occurred in 1969 when he was commissioned by the artist Jasper Johns to make a Splash Piece in Johns's studio. While Serra heated the lead plates to splash against the wall, he took one of the larger plates and set it in the corner where it stood on its own. Serra's break into space followed shortly after with the sculpture Strike: To Roberta and Rudy. Serra wedged an 8 by 24-foot plate of steel into a corner and divided the room into two equal spaces. The work invited the viewer to walk around the sculpture, shifting the viewer's perception of the room as they walked.
Serra first recognized the potential of working in large scale with his Skullcracker Series'' made during the exhibition, "Art and Technology," at LACMA in 1969. He spent ten weeks building a number of ephemeral stacked steel pieces at the Kaiser Steelyard. Using a crane to explore the principles of counterbalance and gravity, the stacks were as tall as 30 to 40 feet high and weighed between 60 and 70 tons. They were knocked down by the steelworkers at the end of each day. The scale of the stacks allowed Serra to begin to think of his work outside the confines of gallery and museum spaces.
Landscape works
In 1970 Serra received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to Japan. His first outdoor sculptures, To Encircle Base Plate and Sugi Tree, were both installed in Ueno Park in Tokyo as part of the Tokyo Biennale.While in Japan, Serra spent most of his time studying the Zen gardens and temples of the Myoshin-ji in Kyoto. The layout of the gardens revealed the landscape as a total field that can only be experienced by walking. The gardens changed Serra's way of seeing space in relation to time. Upon returning to the United States he built his first site-specific outdoor work: To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted. Here Serra embedded two semi-circular steel flanges, forming a ring 26 feet in diameter, into the surface of 183rd Street in the Bronx. One semi-circle measured 1 inch wide and the second, 8 inches wide. The work was visible from two perspectives: either when the viewer came directly upon it or from above on a stairway overlooking the street.
Throughout the 1970s Serra continued to make outdoor site-specific sculptures for urban areas and landscapes. Serra was interested in the topology of landscape and how one relates to it through movement, space, and time. His first landscape work was made in late 1970 when Serra was commissioned by the art patrons Joseph and Emily Rauh Pulitzer to build a sculpture on their property outside St. Louis, Missouri. Pulitzer Piece: Stepped Elevation was Serra's first large-scale landscape work. Three plates measuring 5 feet high by 40 to 50 feet long were placed across approximately 3 acres. The placement of the plates was determined by the fall of the landscape. Each plate was impaled into the ground far enough until its rise was 5 feet. Serra's intention was for the plates to act as cuts in the landscape that function as surrogate horizons as viewers walked amongst them.
Shift, Serra's second endeavor in the landscape, was built in a field owned by the collector Roger Davidson in King City, Ontario. The sculpture is composed of six rectilinear concrete sections placed along the sloping landscape.'' In 2013 Shift was designated a Heritage Site under the Ontario Heritage Act. Shift, like Pulitzer Prizes pieces, was based on the elevational fall of the land over a given distance. The top edges of the plates function as a horizon being placed into specific elevational intervals as you walk the entire field.Serra's subsequent site-specific works in landscape continued to explore the topography of the land and how the sculpture relates to this topography by way of movement, meditation, and perception of the viewer. Among the most notable of the landscape works are Porten i Slugten at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Carnegie outside the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Afangar on Videy Island, Iceland; Schunnemunk Fork in Storm King Art Center, New York; Snake Eyes and Box Cars in Sonoma County, California; Te Tuhirangi Contour in Kaipara, New Zealand; and East-West/West-East in Qatar.
The sculpture Porten i Slugten was commissioned for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark. After walking the museum grounds, Serra chose a ravine that runs towards the Kattegat Sea as the site for his sculpture. The ravine was the only area on the grounds that had not been landscaped. Two plates were set at an angle to each other at the end of a sloping stretch of path which fronts the ravine. The plates function in their location like a gate that opens as the viewer walks down the path toward the sea. Seen from the center of a bridge, which crosses the ravine and leads to the museum, the two plates form a single plane as if the gate had closed. As you walk down from the museum to the ocean below, the plates appear to have a continuous swinging motion. In 1988 Serra was invited by the National Gallery of Iceland to build a work. Serra chose Videy Island as the site for Afangar . The sculpture consists of nine pairs of basalt columns and is placed along the periphery of Vesturey in the western part of the country. All nine locations share the same elevations in that the stones of each pair are situated at an elevation of 9 and 10 meters, respectively. Each set of stones is level at the top. All stones at the higher elevation measure 3 meters; all stones at the lower elevation measure 4 meters. Because of the variance of topography, the stones in a set are sometimes closer together, sometimes further apart. The rise and fall of Videy Island and the surrounding landscape are seen against the fixed measure of the standing stones. The stones are visible along the horizon of the island and orient the viewer against the rise and fall of the surrounding landscape.
Te Tuhirangi Contour is located on a vast open pasture on Gibbs Farm in Kaipara, New Zealand. The sculpture stands 20 feet high and spans 844 feet as one continuous contour that follows the rolling hills, expansion, and contraction of the landscape. The sculpture's elevation is perpendicular to the fall of the land.
East-West/West-East, located on an east-west axis in the Brouq Nature Reserve in Qatar, was commissioned by Sheika al-Mayassa al-Thani of Qatar. It consists of four steel plates either 54 or 48 feet high. The plates are placed at irregular intervals in a valley that runs between two gypsum plateaus. The plates are level with each other and the elevation of the adjacent plateaus. The work spans less than a kilometer and all plates are visible from either end.