Richard Serra valuation
Made sculpture out of shipyard steel at a weight that changes the room and sometimes the street.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938 and worked in steel mills to pay for his education, which is where the material came from.
What a work by Richard Serra is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938 and worked in steel mills to pay for his education, which is where the material came from. Early works threw molten lead against a wall or propped enormous plates against each other by weight alone. Tilted Arc, installed in a Manhattan plaza in 1981, was so unpopular with the people who worked there that it was cut up and removed in 1989 after a public hearing, and he regarded the removal as its destruction. The later Torqued Ellipses and spirals in weatherproof steel are walk-through works of enormous mass. He died in 2024.
The major sculpture is architectural, weighs many tonnes, requires engineering assessment and often a crane and a permanent site, so the practical market is narrow and institutional. Weatherproof steel is intended to develop an oxide surface, so rust is correct and cleaning it is damage. Serra's works on paper are the accessible body of work and are substantial in their own right: dense black paintstick drawings, oil-stick on heavy paper, and a very large printed output in etching and screenprint, catalogued and published in editions of twenty-five to a hundred.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
