by Richard Serra, the American sculptor, who has died aged 85, was known for transforming huge slabs of steel, twisting them into ellipses, spirals, curves and other inspired shapes, making the on large compact pieces of metal that can be placed and beautifully.
Serra was highly regarded by fellow artists and critics and his work was designed to give visitors a physical as well as a visual experience. He wanted the public to walk around and between his sharp, rust-colored metal sculptures, so that the appearance of the pieces would change in relation to each other and to the space. The effect could be unfathomable and unsettling, the huge metal forms looming over the visitor then approaching or looking out – but no one could be left feeling indifferent.
Walking into Serra’s exhibition was like getting lost in a working shipyard, which was no accident. As a boy his father took Richard, a fitter in a shipyard, to see a new liner. Serra remembered the large steel bow sliding down the slope and knew that “all the raw material I needed was found in that memory.”
Richard Antony Serra was born in San Francisco on 2 November 1938, the second of three sons of a Spanish father and a Russian mother. After high school he studied English literature at the University of California, first at Berkeley then at Santa Barbara, where Aldous Huxley was one of his tutors. To finance his studies Serra worked in a steel mill gang, and throughout his life he returned to the mill to learn about new techniques.
As a side interest at Santa Barbara, Serra took up painting under Rico Lebrun and Howard Warshaw in the art department. After graduating in 1961 he sent his portfolio to Yale, where he won a scholarship to study painting, mentored by the abstract expressionist painter Jack Tworkov, who left his contacts within the New York School that he could call people like Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg. and Philip Guston as visiting lecturers.
Serra earned a BA in art history in 1964, an MA in Fine Arts, a travel fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship that took him to Paris. There he studied the work of Brancusi and Giacometti and became friendly with the avant-garde composer Philip Glass. In 1966 he lived for a time in Rome, where he was influenced by composer John Cage’s theories about chance in art, a concept widely explored by Jackson Pollock, whose work influenced Serra when he visited on a show with the artist at the Galleria La Salita. .
However, during a trip to Madrid in 1966, Serra visited the Prado Museum and saw Velázquez’s Las Meninas and decided he could never match the artist’s skill and switched from painting to sculpture, putting his first solo show – mostly made up of live cages and stuffed animals – at the Galleria La Salita.
Returning to the United States towards the end of the year, he moved to New York at a time when minimalism was taking over abstract expressionism. His early pieces, which consisted of strips of metal, rubber and tubes arranged in random patterns, did not impress much. But after being taken by the Leo Castelli Gallery, Serra began to attract attention.
In Scatter Piece (1967) he flung rubber and latex across the gallery floor as a gesture similar to Pollock’s “action-painting”. He also published a “vocabulary” of 84 transitional verbs (cast, roll, tear, prop, etc) that identified sculptural possibilities, and 24 phrases such as “tension, gravity, entropy” that defined external forces that could shape put on a. work. He then explored them through series such as Tearing Lead (1968) and Splashed Lead (1969), art designed to encourage the viewer to reflect on the process of creation.
Serra’s Skullcracker Series (1969), whose name was taken from the California steel yard that supplied the raw material, established the themes associated with his reputation. Steel was often used in sculpture, but it was also used pictorially. Serra wanted to “bring him back home”.
Using a magnetic crane, he stacked 20-foot towers weighing 200 tons of irregularly shaped “top” slabs – scrap steel from the rolling mill – so that they tilted dangerously but did not collapse. Standing before Stacked Steel Slabs (1969) the audience was uncomfortably aware of his weight and the possibility of imminent collapse, but Serra’s triumph was his extraordinary balance, his unfulfilled threat. One-Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) involved tilting four rectangular plates of lead against each other to create the same effect.
Gradually Serra began to attract public commissions. Although his natural habitat was industrial, one of his first commissions was for a landscape. Untitled (1971), a series of concrete walls set in a sloping field, taught him the importance of context and how sculpture can add to or address it. Preparing a piece Serra could spend up to three years walking a site, another year describing the space he wanted to use and another two years deciding what to put there.
Inspired by his outdoor success he began making public works for urban spaces. Terminal (1977), a four-plate 41-foot steel traffic island in Bochum, West Germany, was criticized as an “ugly waste of money” but TWU (1980), a three-plate 36-foot traffic island in SoHo, New. York, and St John’s Rotary Arc (1980), a 200-foot-long, 12-foot-high curved steel wall at the exit of the Holland Tunnel, New York, was well received.
Not all his work went so well in New York. Reiterating the idea of a wall, he erected a 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high steel wall – Tilted Arc (l981) – across the gloomy plaza of the Jacob K Javits Federal Building in midtown Manhattan, 1,300 office workers signed a petition asking for it. The move and even the Village Voice joined the protests, describing the work as “so wrong, so wrong, so bad”.
Serra argued that the statue had a “really lyrical line” and argued that moving it would mean removing it because it was “specific to the site”. But the critics prevailed and after much vitriol the work was dismantled and put into storage. The concept would form the basis of Maya Lin’s highly successful Vietnam War Memorial in Washington.
It wasn’t Serra’s first brush with controversy. In 1971, when a 34-year-old worker was crushed to death by a two-ton steel plate while removing Serra’s structure, the sculptor was attacked, ridiculed and friends advised him to stop working: “He made me analyze for seven. years.”
When he was asked to provide a memorial statue for a plaza near the Treasury in Washington in 1978, he clashed with architect Robert Venturi, who wanted to place the Stars and Stripes on two pylons to frame the building, and he quit the project claiming that his. that the work was not ideological and was “about sculpture and nothing else”.
Serra continued to produce works on paper, mostly monochrome images of geometric forms that were not always appreciated. An abstract exhibition of black oils at the Serpentine Gallery in 1992 was described by one critic as “the most unpleasant exhibition in London”.
But attitudes towards modern art – even minimalist sculpture – changed significantly during Serra’s lifetime and when Weight and Measure, 35 and 39 ton steel blocks, were exhibited in the two central sculpture halls at the Tate in 1992, it was considered that it is a victory.
But it was his Torqued Ellipse series, which began in 1996 and consisted of assemblages of giant rust-colored Cor-Ten steel plates turned into open-topped circular sculptures, that converted even the most skeptical of critics. Serra credited the inspiration for the series to a visit in the early 1990s to the baroque church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, where he was fascinated and unsettled by the relationship between the body and the elliptical dome of Francesco Borromini. His sculptural take on this architectural oddity was a major breakthrough for Serra as his sculptures now contained spaces that people could walk into and explore.
In 2000 Serra exhibited Torqued Ellipse at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, his largest solo show since 1986. In 2005 The Matter of Time, consisting of eight massive steel sculptures – torqued ellipses as well as spirals, the installation largest sculpture in the world. – opened at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank Gehry, to almost universal critical acclaim. In this way the pieces, which remain on permanent display, helped to solve a problem by filling a room that was far too large for any other work.
One of his last works was East-West/West-East (2014), four tall steel plates standing across a kilometer of desert at the Brouq National Reserve in Qatar.
Aware of alternative media, Serra made two films to explore his ideas about industrialization. Railway Turning (1976) placed a camera on a rotating hammer bridge, while Steelmill/Stahlwerk (1979) luxuriated in the surroundings he knew best.
In 1964 Richard Serra married the sculptor Nancy Graves. The marriage was soon dissolved, and in 1981 he married the German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf, with whom he collaborated on Steelmill/Stahlwerk. She lives on.
Richard Serra, born 2 November 1938, died 26 March 2024
