Richard Serra

Richard Serra (born November 2, 1938, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died March 26, 2024, Orient, New York) was an American sculptor known for his large-scale abstract steel sculptures, whose substantial presence forces viewers to engage with the physical qualities of the works and their particular sites. Like other minimalists of his generation, Serra steered clear of art as metaphor or symbol, proposing instead the idea of sculpture as a phenomenological experience of weight, gravity, space, process, and time. Yet his sculptures still evoke a sense of the sublime through their sheer scale and materiality.

Serra was exposed early to the processes of metalwork; his father worked as a pipe fitter in the shipbuilding industry, and Richard worked in steel mills during his college years. He entered the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957 and graduated from the university’s Santa Barbara campus in 1961 with a B.A. in English literature. Serra had been interested in art since childhood, however, and he went on to study painting at Yale University, where by 1964 he had earned both B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees. Supported by fellowships, he spent time in France and Italy before moving to New York City in 1966.

Serra’s sculptures and drawings were exhibited regularly in Europe and the United States, and in 1968 he began a long association with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City; an early show consisted of molten-lead splashings and castings at the meeting of wall and floor. The scale of Serra’s work grew with pieces (his “props”) constructed by such techniques as pinning a sheet of steel to the wall with a rolled lead pipe and leaning steel sheets against each other in configurations that were held together by gravity alone. In 1970 he began creating large-scale sculptures of rolled steel plates and curved slabs that were designed for specific sites. Serra’s interest in place and the way an object can shape the space around it made him a popular artist for public art commissions.

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One of his key artworks, Tilted Arc, commissioned in 1981 by the U.S. government for Federal Plaza in New York City, brought heated discussions about its artistic purpose and its effect on the public space. The piece, which measured 120 feet (36 meters) long and 12 feet (almost 4 meters) high, was positioned in such a manner that movement through the plaza was impeded, thus forcing people to engage with the sculpture by walking around it to cross the plaza. After a public hearing in 1985 concerning myriad complaints about the piece and a subsequent challenge by Serra, the piece was destroyed in 1989.

In 1993 Serra became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for sculpture. In 2000 he won the Golden Lion for contemporary art at the 49th Venice Biennale. Eight Serra works, collectively called The Matter of Time (completed 2005), were permanently installed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain) in what critics praised as a stunningly appropriate use of their setting. Serra in 2008 became the second artist invited to participate in Monumenta, an art event for which a selected artist creates an original exhibition within the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris. In 2010 he received Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, and in 2015 he became a chevalier of the French Legion of Honour.