Richard Serra, the American artist known for pushing the boundaries of sculpture, has died at the age of 85.
Mr. Serra died Tuesday at his home in New York. Her cause of death was pneumonia, her lawyer John Silverman confirmed to the New York Times.
Serra was best known for its giant curved oxidized steel plates, such as the 1,034-ton series. a matter of time It fills the main hall of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. These heavy works are said to fundamentally transform the space in which they are installed and provoke a physical reaction in the viewer. “I work at the edge of possibility,” Serra once said.
Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939 to a Russian-Jewish mother who installed pipes in a shipyard and a Spanish father. Young Serra was inspired by seeing ships launched as a child and was encouraged to paint by his mother. He studied art at Yale University with Chuck Close and Nancy Graves, who later became his first wife, but he pranked visiting critic and artist Robert Rauschenberg by bringing a live chicken to class. As a result, he was suspended from school for two weeks.
Serra found inspiration during a trip to Paris with Philip Glass. During that time, he visited Constantin Brancusi’s studio and strolled through the hangouts of his hero Alberto Giacometti. But in Spain, while looking at Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (a 17th-century group portrait with the concept of looking), Serra began to rethink everything he knew about art. After a period of “total turmoil”, including creating stuffed animals, he reinvented his practice around sculpture and the idea that the viewer himself becomes the true subject of his work.
“The whole subject-object relationship is reversed. It’s you inside!” he told the Guardian in 2008. “If you don’t get into the work and work on it, it has no substance.”
Serra spent much of the 1960s as part of New York’s underground art scene, where he worked with unconventional materials such as latex, neon, and molten lead. The last thing I used was a “splash piece” where I threw it on the bottom. Hardens the wall surface to a ragged metal. As the decade drew to a close, he made breakthroughs. Strike: To Roberta and RudyThere, he realized he was closer to his goal of dividing the room in two with a steel plate and playing with the viewer’s perspective.
In 1970, Serra divorced Graves and created site-specific landscape sculptures throughout Japan, Canada, and the United States, focusing on the topography of each location and how the work affects the viewer as they walk around. We have started production. However, it was his urban sculptures that caused the most controversy. When his Tilted Ark was installed in Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1981, the 120-foot-long (36.5 meter) rusted steel frame polarized opinion, with critics labeling it an eyesore. I did. Serra even recalled seeing a poster with the phrase “Kill Sera.” At a public hearing in 1985, a jury voted in favor of removing the sculpture. Mr. Serra went so far as to sue the U.S. government over the ruling, but was unsuccessful. The work has been divided into three parts and is currently stored in a warehouse in Brooklyn. “I don’t think the role of art is to please people,” Serra complained at the time, likening the loss of the sculpture to a death in his family.
But as he grew up, the public grew fond of his huge steel mills. It seemed to reference the industrial era and shipyards of his childhood. Fulcrum, installed near London’s Liverpool Street station in 1987, fared better than Tilted His Arc. His love for his work began to accelerate in his next decade, when he broke with the right angles of modernism and embraced curves. All of his Torqued Ellipses, made in the 1990s using rolled steel, could be climbed inside and walked around. His eight curved sculptures “Matter of Time”, created for his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao from 1994 to 2005, became the defining work of his career. Two years after they were installed, Serra held his second retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is installed in landscapes and museums around the world, from Iceland to Qatar to New Zealand.
Serra, who married art historian Clara Weiergraf in 1981, continued to work as an artist well into his 80s, and called his 2019 exhibition at New York’s Gagosian Gallery his “heaviest exhibition to date.” “A meeting”. Until his death, he was considered America’s most famous living sculptor, but his heavy, physical work was increasingly at odds with the light ephemerality of the digital age. In fact, when conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin asked in 2015 who other artists work in sculpture the same way he does, he replied: “I don’t think anyone would.”
