Richard Serra
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. 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.
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