Richard Serra

Summary of Richard Serra

Richard Serra is one of the preeminent American artists and sculptors of the post-Abstract Expressionist period. Beginning in the late 1960s to the present, his work has played a major role in advancing the tradition of modern abstract sculpture in the aftermath of Minimalism. His work draws new, widespread attention to sculpture's potential for experience by viewers in both physical and visual terms, no less often within a site-specific, if not highly public setting.

Accomplishments

• Coming of age in the shadow of greats such as Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, and Julio González, Serra both inherited and advanced the tradition of abstract sculpture, adapting the medium of welded steel (originally a concern of early-20^th-century Cubism) to new, holistic values of the 1960s and 1970s. More recent Minimalist sculptors, among them Donald Judd and Carl Andre, had demonstrated how sculpture and its materials could stand for themselves, or not be forced to serve as vehicles for articulating an artist's emotional and intellectual life. Serra took up that contemporary heritage, one suggesting that the human body itself no longer had a place in painting or sculpture, and returned to it something of the human body's stature. He explored how an art work might relate intimately to a specific setting; how it might take up a physical as well as a visual relationship to a viewer; and how it might create spaces (or environments) in which a viewer can experience universal qualities of weight, gravity, agility, and even a kind of meditative repose.
• Serra's adaptive sensibility in working collaboratively with, or learning from, contemporary musicians, dancers, and videographers, was part of an era in American art in which artists increasingly explored various disciplines for their overlapping and shared concerns with a new kind of art that might push the viewer's experience beyond the purely visual or optical act towards a fully physical, or "somatic" participation. Serra's work is at once a painting, a sculpture, a piece of architecture, and an epic fragment of modern industry.
• Serra's concern with the implicit relationship between his sculpture's conception and its intended site has led directly to a new international discourse (often a heated one) regarding the role and governance of art in public spaces such as municipal parks, corporate plazas, and memorial sites - where the work of art might virtually interrupt viewers' daily routines in ways that are not necessarily universally welcomed among a given community. Serra's sculpture indeed suggests that art should be something "participatory" in modern society, that is, a gesture, or physical insertion into everyday life, not something confined to a cloistered museum space.
• Serra's materials and methods, i.e. large-scale steel panels and welding, has been interpreted by some feminist historians as a "last gasp" of Abstract Expressionism's so-called masculine themes and artistic processes. His work has thus unwittingly inspired a host of counter-responses by subsequent generations, who, decidedly in rejection of his histrionic example, turned in the late 1970s and 1980s toward more ephemeral, everyday materials to suggest that art could be monumental without relying on massive, "in your face" substances and formats.

Biography of Richard Serra

Serra's sculpted pieces, such as Tilted Spheres shown here inside an airport, are larger than life and trully evoke awe in most passerby. Serra took many years of artistic explorations to arrive at such forms.

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