Richard Serra (1938 - 2024), the artist who rethought contemporary sculpture

Richard Serra, arguably the greatest sculptor of our times, attracted a great following and rethought the meanings and potential of contemporary sculpture. He died on March 26, 2024, aged 85, at his home on Long Island, New York.

One of Serra’s strongest childhood memories was witnessing the launch of a giant ship – “as big as a skyscraper on its side”, in his words – at a shipyard near San Francisco. His proud father, a pipefitter at the yard, had taken his then four-year-old son to see this enormous object he worked on being released into the water. Serra was amazed that something so massive could feel so light, even lyrical, gliding effortlessly over the water. The scene became ingrained in his memory and he repeatedly revisited it in his dreams. Coming in contact with Serra’s multi-ton rolled Cor-ten steel pieces, gently curved and placed intriguingly – directly on the floor – evokes the prow of a ship in motion and seems to suggest a strong connection to the sculptor’s experience as a child. In reality, his path to becoming a sculptor was not consequential at all.

Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938 to a working-class family, with a Spanish immigrant father and a Jewish mother from Tsarist Russia. The second of three sons, he sought attention through drawing, which he had loved since childhood. His mother dragged him to museums and would introduce him to friends and strangers as “Richard the artist”. Still, he did not envision becoming an artist. After initially studying English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, while working at steel mills to make ends meet, Serra transferred to its Santa Barbara campus and started taking art classes. He was then accepted to Yale, where he studied with Chuck Close and Brice Marden. His professors included Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella. At the time, he pursued painting; he was influenced by American abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The young Serra was particularly drawn to their gestural and performative ways of painting.

Serra graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1961. Throughout that decade, he searched for different materials to work with. He explored notions such as volume, space, mass, texture, process, time and the work’s relation to the viewer. He discovered that the function of art was to change meaning through perception. The Minimalist and conceptual artists he admired most included Carl Andre, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Barnett Newman, and Robert Smithson. He befriended many of them after moving to New York in 1966. In a 1995 video recorded by SFMoMA, Serra talked about one of his earliest experiments with lead, Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift (1969/1995). He heated and melted many tons of lead, one pot at a time, and used a large ladle to splash it against the wall along the floor juncture – which he called the “gutter”. He used a gas mask while performing this toxic operation all alone. Once the lead cooled, a team of volunteers helped him to pull the cast, a beautifully textured linear gutter shaped like a corner. He used 15 tons of lead to produce a whole field of them. “I'm working at the edge of what's possible,” he once declared.

Serra kept searching for new ways of making and doing and seeing. In addition to lead, he experimented with rubber, wood, neon tubing, and even stuffed and live animals in cages. In 1969 the sculptor happened to wedge a small steel plate into a corner of a room and discovered that it could stay that way on its own. Then he placed a much larger piece, an 8-foot by 24-foot steel plate, one inch thick, in the corner of a gallery space. He called this three-ton object Strike. Soon after, another installation was born, four such plates, one at each corner of a square room with enough space in the centre for a single viewer to experience this precarious balancing act, titled Circuit, at any given time. Serra focused on asking fundamental questions of perception and relationships, as well as weight, mass, gravity, stasis, convexity and concavity, and counterbalance. Endless curiosity, inquisitiveness, and most of all, playfulness, constituted his way of working. He grew determined to redefine the nature of sculpture, challenging the work of the most seminal artists—Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, and even Pablo Picasso. Serra thought their sculptures were too pictorial. He called them volumetric paintings. If they worked on pieces on the floor and the wall, he wanted to work with volumes in space. It was walking in and around space that was the subject of his work, where space, object, and void all fused into singularity. Steel was used to organise time, space, and movement. Why did he work with steel? Not because it was heavy, but because he could make it appear light.

Opportunities to experiment on an ever-larger scale started coming his way. Some proved to be controversial, like Tilted Arc (1981), a 12-foot-tall and 120-foot-long wall of curved steel commissioned by the General Services Administration and paid for with taxpayers’ money. The sculptor chose to position his work right in the middle of a plaza, in front of a federal office building in Lower Manhattan. It was meant to engage the bureaucrats and the public, but people misunderstood it and thought it was an eyesore, even a nuisance that interrupted their familiar walking shortcuts. It sparked a debate. Serra was criticised and even received death threats over the phone. Finally, a court hearing ended in the sculpture's removal in 1989. Despite this, he continued to be celebrated in New York and around the world.     

In a 2001 interview with Charlie Rose, which may be the journalist’s best and among his most intimate conversations, Serra noted, “If you want to make art you have to suspend judgement and you have to involve yourself with play and not worry about the outcome. And play is not about what is foreseen; it is about what’s unforeseen.” He spoke passionately of the potential of sculpture to change how people see and think when they walk in and through volumes and spaces. He continued, “I wanted to open that volume and walk into it and through it, and around it.” One would assume Serra loved architecture, but he had a complicated relationship with objects so much bigger than even the biggest of his sculptures. In any case, he looked down on architects. He thought there were too many constraints to identify their creations as art. The sculptor told Rose quite bluntly, “Most of what you see in architecture are watered-down ideas of sculptors who have come before.”

I met Serra at Gagosian West 24th Street in the spring of 2006 while Richard Serra, Rolled and Forged was showing, one of many of his exhibits at the gallery. By then he was “the most famous artist alive”, as christened by Robert Hughes, an art critic for the Guardian. The world’s top art museums planned their new buildings with Serra’s enormous sculptures in mind. Most famously, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao holds what is perhaps Serra’s most celebrated piece, The Matter of Time (1994-2005). It comprises seven spiralling and snaking torqued sculptures, all made of hot-rolled Cor-Ten steel. The composition marches along a huge ground-floor gallery; it is 430 feet long, 80 feet wide, 14 feet high, and weighs 1,034 tons. I remember walking into it accidentally; it left an orange mark on my hand – it slowed me down.

At the Gagosian in New York, we discussed Serra’s work in front of Elevations, Repetitions, a field of aligned and evenly spaced planar plates made of weathering steel. Similarly sized, each between about three-four feet high, up to 30 feet long and six inches thick, they all stand on their edges without any additional support. The scene, recalling flattened gravestones, looked arresting – walking in between those steel rows was unnerving. When Serra came in, he swiftly looked sideways and asked in a disarming manner, "Do I remind you of anyone?" I was puzzled. He explained, "People tell me I look like Picasso." I agreed, "Now I see it!" He then inquired where I was from. "Odessa," I responded, knowing he would like that. He said happily, "My mother was born in Odessa." It was a fine start. He then went on to share a few stories about processing steel, his favourite obelisk in Egypt, experiencing Zen gardens in Japan, and the importance of sculpture coming off the pedestal. Finally, I asked, “Where did the idea of Torqued Ellipses come from?”

“I was in Rome – he began – when I worked on conical sections and walked into a [Francesco] Borromini church, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Surprisingly, I saw that an oval on the floor and the dome above were misaligned. That was odd because Borromini was always perfect. So, I thought something was turned or shifted. But when I walked into the centre, I realised it was an illusion and everything was precisely aligned. Then I thought—what if I made a space embraced by a surface in such a way that at every elevation its radius would remain the same? The surface would lean in and out, but the radius would always be the same. So, I took two elliptical pieces of wood representing the void in the ceiling and the other piece of wood representing the elliptical void on the floor. I connected them with a dowel and twisted the ellipses to misalign them. Then I started to roll it on the floor to get the pattern that I was looking for and wrap it around the ellipses. I used lead to play with the surface because it is the most pliable and easy material to work with. Then I went to a nautical engineer who was working with Gehry on [Guggenheim] Bilbao at the time and he helped me resolve it on the computer. Of course, this shape is not going to change the world, but it is an invention. And all my pieces are solid. I never make anything hollow! You know, you can make objects appear weightless, even floating, simply by placing them in certain ways?”

Many architects told me that they were inspired by Serra’s art. And it so happens that the artist himself got his inspiration from a building and a ship.