Richard Serra, who has died aged 85, was a remarkable cultural figure; He was a sculptor belonging to the generation of American minimalists, associated with process art and making experimental films, but still evoking something of an older, more heroic age. Critic Robert Hughes described him as “the last abstract expressionist”.
Although this statement is stretching the plot somewhat, Serra’s interest in the processes of sculpture led him to some exaggerated gestural actions that belie the seriousness of major public commissions. Weight and Measure, painted for what is now Tate Britain in the early 1990s, exemplified its austere direction, with massive steel forms designed to counter the building’s oppressive classicism. However, some of his other works are also decidedly baroque, such as the twisting, “torqued” structures installed at the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 2005.
Dominated by ellipses and spirals that twist around the Snake, an existing sculpture commissioned for the museum’s opening in 1997, these steel works articulate spaces within which the gallery visitor can wander. They are monumental enough to mimic Frank Gehry’s majestic architecture, but with their patinated surfaces and curved forms, they also have an intimate, sensual quality. Above all, Serra’s sculptures create a remarkable interaction with the public and a powerful experience of gradual discovery; This is where the name of the installation comes from: The Matter of Time.
His works have become popular with curators but are not limited to museums. They have appeared in settings as diverse as the Tuileries garden in Paris, the Federal Plaza in New York, and the Qatar desert, and have received reactions ranging from intense admiration to public inquiry. One of his sculptures, Fulcrum, was installed in Broadgate, outside London’s Liverpool Street station, in 1987. Made from weathered steel plates that appear to precariously support each other, it manages to combine monumentality with fragility.
He was born in San Francisco into a family that laid the foundation for his later career as a metal sculptor. His father, Tony, a Majorcan, was a pipefitter at a military shipyard. His mother, Gladys (née Fineberg), the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Odessa, introduced her son as “Richard the artist” and was touchingly excited when he later set off for New York. During his student years, Serra worked in steel mills and then in 1979 made Steelmill/Stahlwerk, an intriguing film about German workers in the industry.
Serra began his studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 1957, graduating with a degree in English literature from the institution’s Santa Barbara campus. He followed this with a three-year painting course at Yale University in New Haven in 1961; During this period he also worked as a teaching assistant and proofreader for Joseph Albers’s Interaction of Color (1963). At Yale, he encountered such intellectuals as Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella, and in 1964 he won a scholarship that would take him to Europe.
Serra was deeply influenced by the sculpture of Constantin Brâncuși in Paris, but continued painting the following year in Florence, producing colored grids under timed conditions controlled by a stopwatch. However, in his first exhibition at the Galleria La Salita in Rome in 1966, he took a decisive step away from painting and filled cages with live and stuffed animals.
After moving to New York that same year, Serra survived by starting out as a furniture dismantler, initially alongside friends, composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Serra’s artistic development during this period was rapid; He was moving from experiments in rubber, fiberglass and neon tubes to the metal sculptures for which he was famous. He soon began his long-term relationship with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York; here in 1969 he was photographed throwing molten lead against the wall with a ladle in the warehouse annex.
That same year, Serra improved this procedure by splattering metal onto a small steel plate affixed to the corner of Jasper Johns’ studio. The “castings” produced when the lead cooled were rough, expressive forms, but the project also inspired Serra to create more impersonal pieces in which sheets of metal were squeezed into the angles of rooms, leaned against each other, or attached to the wall. lead pipes. His emphasis on objective phenomena (mass, gravity and other physical forces) can also be seen in his remarkable experimental films.
In The Hand Catching the Bullet (1968), the hand actually belongs to the artist but is shown disembodied; Instead of shedding falling lead fragments, he tries to knock them out or miss them entirely. The repetition of this essentially meaningless action gives the film a serial quality similar to the celluloid process itself.
Serra’s interest in cutting-edge technology also led him to work with land artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt. In 1970, he helped them build the Spiral Pier on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and after Smithson’s death in 1973, Serra helped complete the Amarillo Ramp on an artificial lake in Texas. His own site-specific sculptures included Spin Out: For Bob Smithson (1972-73), set in the park-like surroundings of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. Here, three converging steel plates interact with each other and their surroundings, exemplifying Serra’s aim for “the entire space to become a sculptural manifestation.”
The 1970s were a difficult decade in Serra’s life. In 1971, a worker died in an accident while installing one of Serra’s sculptures outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His five-year marriage to artist Nancy Graves ended in 1970, and his mother’s suicide in 1977 was followed by his father’s death two years later. But in the same decade, he also met his future wife, art historian Clara Weyergraf, with whom he worked at Steelmill/Stahlwerk. Clara would also play a vital role in shaping his sculpture, giving her name to Clara-Clara, a powerful, curvilinear work installed in the Tuileries garden in 1983. The history of this piece exemplifies Serra’s problems with placemaking. It was a private work of art, as it was originally intended to be included in an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, but at a later stage it was deemed too heavy.
Clara-Clara’s travails were minuscule compared to the 36-foot-tall Tilted Arc statue erected in Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1981. Condemned for being intrusive, a magnet for graffiti artists, and even a safety risk, the statue was finally removed in 1989, four years after a public hearing in which the majority of witnesses argued for preserving the work.
Despite this setback, Serra’s career continued to flourish. In 1986 and 2007, he held two retrospective exhibitions at the New York Museum of Modern Art, which devoted a permanent room to his monumental work Equal (2015), as well as important exhibitions at home and abroad. He has exhibited frequently with his gallery Gagosian in London, New York and Paris, most recently in 2021.
He received the Gold Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2001, the Légion d’honneur in France in 2015, and the J Paul Getty Medal three years later.
In his final years, Serra became heavily involved in public projects in Qatar; specifically four steel plates built west of Doha in 2014, rising over 14 meters and spanning more than a kilometer. It is known as East-West/West-East. The work creates an extraordinary connection with its surroundings, the gypsum plateau of the Brouq nature reserve in the Dukhan Desert. Serra described it as “the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done.”
He is survived by Clara.
• Richard Serra, artist, born November 2, 1938; Died March 26, 2024