Richard Serra, the American artist whose giant steel sculptures covered in a beautiful rusted patina adorned the landscape and dominated the vast galleries of some of the world’s finest museums, died on Tuesday, The New York Times reported. reported. He was 85 years old.
The artist died of pneumonia at his home in Long Island, New York, the newspaper reported, citing his lawyer John Silverman.
Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938 to a Spanish father and a Russian mother, grew up visiting the shipyards where his father worked, and supported himself in his youth, according to biographies from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum. He worked at a steel mill for this purpose. .
Despite the large scale of his work, he was considered artistically minimalist, with an emphasis on the dimensions of the art relative to the viewer rather than elaborate imagery.
After studying at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University, he moved to New York in 1966 and began creating art using engineered materials such as metal, fiberglass, and rubber.
Although he later became very popular, one of his 1981 works was so unpopular that it was removed from public spaces in Lower Manhattan, ARTnews reported.
The Tilted Ark, a 120-foot-tall iron bar, is today “remembered as one of the most criticized works of public art in the city’s history.” Therefore, it was eventually removed,” ARTnews said.
His breakthrough came in 1969 when he was selected for the “Nine Young Artists: Theodoron Prize” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
After traveling to Spain in the early 1980s to study Mozarabian architecture, his work gained fame in Europe, with solo exhibitions in major museums in Germany and France.
Serra’s work was particularly appreciated in his father’s native Spain, where a retrospective exhibition of Serra’s work was held in 1992 at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, and the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao exhibited only Serra’s work. .
A 2002 New Yorker profile titled “Man of Steel” described him as “a stocky man with a large head, close-cropped gray bangs, and dark eyes with an intense gaze that reminded me of Picasso.” He is described as a “strong and strong man.”
The same work was about Serra’s realization that he was not a painter after seeing Diego Velázquez’s 1656 painting Las Meninas at the Prado Museum in Madrid.
“That almost stopped me,” Serra said. “Cezanne didn’t stop me, de Kooning and Pollack didn’t stop me, but Velazquez seemed like a bigger problem that needed to be addressed. It was like we nailed it.”
