Richard Serra
Richard Serra is a prominent American sculptor known for his large-scale installations that often engage with themes of space, balance, and gravity. Born on November 2, 1938, in San Francisco, Serra developed an interest in sculpture at a young age, inspired by the launch of an oil tanker. He initially pursued studies in English literature but transitioned to the visual arts, influenced by European masters like Diego Velázquez. Serra's artistic journey led him to create significant works using materials like lead and steel, with notable series including Splash and Props, which laid the groundwork for his monumental outdoor sculptures.
His most recognized creations include the Torqued Ellipse series and installations such as Tilted Arc and Gravity, which have sparked both acclaim and controversy. Serra's art often emphasizes the process of creation, aligning him with the movement known as Process Art. Throughout his career, he received numerous accolades, including the US National Arts Award and the J. Paul Getty Medal. Serra continued to work actively into the 2020s, leaving a lasting impact on contemporary sculpture before his passing on March 26, 2024.
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Subject Terms
Richard Serra
Sculptor
- Born: November 2, 1938
- Place of Birth: San Francisco, California
- Died: March 26, 2024
- Place of Death: Orient, New York
Significance: Richard Serra was a highly regarded post-abstract expressionist sculptor best known for his large installation sculptures in public places.
Background
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco, California, on November 2, 1938. His mother was a Russian Jew, and his father was Spanish and worked as a pipefitter in the nearby shipyards. Serra was the middle son of three: his older brother, J. Anthony Serra, was a well-known civil rights attorney, and his younger brother, Rudy Serra, also became an artist.
During his early years, Serra had little contact with what are traditionally known as the fine arts of sculpture and painting. In interviews, he attributed his interest in sculpture to an experience he had in a marine shipyard on his fourth birthday. An oil tanker was being launched, and Serra was there to witness it. Despite his young age, he was impressed by the metal ship’s long, smooth, curved lines and the ease with which its bulk moved into the water. His curiosity in art awakened, Serra began to draw.
After high school, Serra attended the University of California at both Berkeley and Santa Barbara, where he ultimately received a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1961. Serra followed this with master's level studies at Yale University School of Art and Architecture. Throughout subsequent studies in Europe, including time in France and Italy, Serra focused on painting.
Then during a trip to Spain in 1965, he saw Diego Velázquez’s most famous work, Las Meninas (1656). This painting’s intriguing composition depicts the artist, as well as several other individuals in the room, looking out at the viewer as if the viewer is the painter’s subject. After seeing this painting, Serra decided painting as an art form was too limiting and turned to more three-dimensional formats for his creations.
Life’s Work
Serra returned to the United States in 1966 and began creating sculptures out of rubber and metal in a studio in New York City. From 1968 to 1970, he focused on a series of works called Splash, which he created by throwing melted lead against the space where the wall met the floor in his studio. In 1969, he also began his Props series, which featured large slabs of metal leaning against each other or propped in place by square metal rods. In 1970 he received a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship.
The Props series eventually led to larger scale metal sculptures, sometimes but not always erected in outdoor spaces. These include Shift, a concrete work created in Ontario, Canada, between 1970 and 1972; Spin Out, composed of large steel plates on the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, in 1972 and 1973; Carnegie, made by commission for the Carnegie Museum of Art between 1984 and 1985; Gravity, a large, thick steel block sheet standing on another steel sheet, which was created commission for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993; and perhaps Serra’s most famous work, his Torqued Ellipse series, the first of which was completed in 1996 and the last of which was dated 2004.
A model was always been the first step in Serra’s creative process. Sometimes he used a wooden model but most often he made the model out of lead. A structural engineer determined if the piece is practical to construct and what changes needed to be made for the sculpture to safely hold its form. Following that, a team of fabricators created the individual components of the sculpture, which were then installed by a rigging company. Serra’s large, heavy works resulted in least two serious accidents; one in 1971 in which a worker was crushed to death by one of a sculpture’s huge plates and another in 1989 in which a worker lost a leg while dismantling one of Serra’s works.
In addition to the tragic deaths, Serra’s art occasionally caused controversy and sometimes public outrage. His earliest works in Europe included some that incorporated caged animals—Serra used stuffed animals at first but switched to live animals for his first solo exhibit in Rome in 1966. The exhibit was shut down because of public outrage over the caged animals. Later, several of his large sculptures raised objections because of their enormous size. Terminal, a 41-foot-tall tower made of trapezoids,was the subject of staunch public complaints even before it was installed in Bochum, Germany. Another work, Tilted Arc, caused legal action to be taken in New York City after workers in a nearby building complained that it impeded their progress across Federal Plaza when it was installed in 1981. Hearings were held in 1985, and the structure was subsequently removed and stored in a warehouse.
Still, despite occasional controversy, Serra's work helped him establish a reputation as one of the most important sculptors in the US during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. After completing his Torqued Ellipse series in 2004 he continued working throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s. Some of his sculptures during that period included Equal (2015) and Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure (2017). He also worked in other artistic forms; for example, he had long created silkscreen works of art and remained active in this medium during the 2010s with the creation of works such as Elevational Weight (2016) and (?) (2018).
By the 2020s, Serra's work had garnered him numerous awards in Europe, the United States, and Japan, including a US National Arts Award in 2014 and a J. Paul Getty Medal in 2018. Serra died in Orient, New York, on March 26, 2024.
Impact
Richard Serra was a prolific, award-winning artist whose minimalist work has captured artistic concepts such as scale, balance, and gravity. He is credited as being one of the founders of what is known as Process Art, where the artistic results rely heavily on the process used to create them; his early Splash works, which were created by forcefully throwing lead against a wall, is an example of this type of art.
Personal
Serra was been married twice, first to fellow sculptor Nancy Graves (1939–95) from 1965 to 1970. In 1981, Serra married art historian Clara Weyergraf. The couple purchased homes in both New York and Nova Scotia. They remained married until Serra's death in 2024.
Bibliography
"Richard Serra." Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 2024, www.moma.org/artists/5349. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.
"Richard Serra." San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, www.sfmoma.org/artist/Richard‗Serra/. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.
"Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipse (Bihurritu eliptiko)." Guggenheim, www.guggenheim.org/artwork/17143. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.
Smith, Roberta. "Richard Serra, Who Recast Sculpture on a Massive Scale, Dies at 85." The New York Times, 26 Mar. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/arts/richard-serra-dead.html. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.