Richard Serra

 

San Francisco 1939

 

The reason I got involved in the curve is that if you look at its form, its concavity, from a certain position, you see it whole; if you change position and travel along it, you see the curve in its convexity, but not the whole. These contradictions in perception gave rise to my interest in space. I asked myself why this happened, and I sought an answer by changing the point of observation of things, of environments. (R. Serra, 2007)

Born in San Francisco, California, on November 2, 1939. Between 1957 and 1961 he studied English literature at Berkeley and of Santa Barbara, then fine arts at Yale from 1961 to 1964. He paid his way by working in the steel mills. After staying at Paris and Italy, in the late sixties he moved to New York. His early Abstract Expressionist works were splashes of molten lead (Splashing Series, 1968-70), repeated in the film short Hand Catching Lead of 1969. At the same time he produced compositions of materials in precarious balance such as House of Cards (One Ton Prop), 1968-69. In the early seventies he produced impressive sculptures made of thick slabs of folded steel, which he erected in urban or natural settings (Shift, 1970-72, King City Ontario), sometimes arousing controversy as in the case of the installation Titled Arc in Federal Plaza, New York, in 1981 (dismantled in 1985). Another sculpture, Terminal, was exhibited in 1977 before the Fridericianum in Kassel as part of Documenta 6. It consisted of large self-supporting rolls or sheets of metal, designed to sag with time while defying the force of gravity. The artist returned to Documenta in 1987. The series of Torqued Ellipses of 1996–99 create private places sculpted among their curves within the public spaces where they are placed. In 2002 the artist appeared as Hiram Abiff in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3. In 2003 he exhibited in Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples the homonymous work Naples, today in the Guggenheim of Bilbao together with Snake, with which Serra took part in 2005 in the 51st Venice Biennale. He lives and works near New York City and in Nova Scotia.