On March 26, the American sculptor Richard Serra died at the age of 85 in his home on Long Island, a quiet New York neighborhood. We remember his life and his work, one of the most unique, revolutionary and notable sculptures of the last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21st. Serra is and will always be remembered as the author of immense works in which the viewer immerses himself; sculptures that fuse time, space and metal.
Son of a Majorcan man and a Russian woman from Odessa, he was born in 1938 in San Francisco, USA. His introduction to the forge and metals was very early; his father worked in the city's shipyards. However, his first undergraduate degree was in Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara (between 1957-1961). His need made him return to that childhood passion, and to cover the expenses of his youth on the West Coast, he found work in a steel mill. That new contact with metal motivated him to begin studying Art at Yale University (1961-1964). Between both institutions he evolved with magnificent teachers, luminaries of North American culture: the writers Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, the painter Philip Guston and the composer Morton Feldman. He studied painting, but abandoned it after visiting Constantin Brancusi's studio during his training stay in Europe, and finally when he saw Las meninas by Velázquez for the first time, he declared in 2002 to The New Yorker magazine: "I thought there was no possibility to even get close to all that: the viewer in relation to the space, the painter included in the painting, the mastery with which he could go from the abstract to a figure or a dog. [Velázquez] persuaded me [to leave it]. Cézanne had not stopped me, De Kooning and Pollock neither, but Velázquez seemed like something much bigger to manage”.
His name began to resonate in the 1960s. In 1968 he shared the legendary exhibition at Leo Castelli's gallery where he threw molten lead against a wall and the floor so that the metal crashed before solidifying.
Years later, in 1981, he installed the Tilted Arc in a Federal Plaza in New York, in front of a public building, the General Services Administration. This is the first of his pieces in the style that characterizes him, a work of monumental, public ambition, the immense minimalism of a gently curved steel wall 3.5 meters high and 36 meters long. The work sparked controversy due to the disruption it caused, especially to the building's employees. A public hearing in 1985 voted in favor of the work being moved to another location, but Serra claimed during that hearing that the sculpture was at his specific site and was created for that site. "To take away the job would be to destroy it," he said. Finally, in 1989 the sculpture was cut into three fragments and stored in a warehouse. However, for Serra, upon being displaced from that place, the work was already dead. His author also noted that, by ignoring his argument and treating it as furniture, the General Services Administration had made the work "exactly what it should not be: a mobile, marketable product."
The Tilted Arc removal, March 15, 1989. Photograph: Jennifer Kotter.
From then on, public spaces around the world show off their monumental curved plates of rusty steel. To mention a few, Fulcrum, from 1987, measuring 16.8 meters and made with five Corten steel plates, commissioned for the west entrance of Liverpool Street station in the Broadgate complex, or Berlin Curves, from 1986, installed on the street Berlin's Tiergarten, as a memorial to the victims of euthanasia.
Berlin Curves, from 1986, installed on Tiergarten street in Berlin.
Finally, his consecrating work will arrive at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao with the installation in the building designed by Frank. O Gery from the series of seven sculptures titled The Matter of Time. There the public tours the complex in the Sala del Pez -130 meters long and 30 wide: 3,000 square meters of surface-, its pieces live in a different way, with people next to and inside; he reinvented the experience of viewing art. Until then, art in museums was viewed from a distance. At the distance marked by the security perimeter. They did not rub, they did not touch, they did not inhabit each other.
Richard Serra breaks not only scale, logic and perspective, he also blows up the viewer/sculpture relationship. He said it himself: "I consider space to be a material. All I have done has been to trace paths, walk and experience time. And to make of that gesture a poetics of the place that makes sense when someone settles among the works converting the experience in the work itself.”
The Matter of Time, a structure composed of seven steel sculptures, installed in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2005.
Walking through its interior causes a very special, unique sensation. Photography: Hilario.