Richard Serra ( born November 2, 1939 in San Francisco, California, USA ) is an American sculptor best known for his massive abstract steel sculptures, in which the essential presence challenges the physical qualities of the pieces and their specific locations.
However, his sculptures still evoke a sense of sublime due to their immensity and materiality. One of the most significant artists of his generation, he created large-scale sculptures for architectural, urban and landscape landscapes around the world, from Iceland to New Zealand. These monolithic sculptures focus on gravity, balance and strength while maintaining a certain beauty and simplicity.
Over the past 50 years, legendary artist Richard Serra has earned countless awards and international fame creating monumental steel sculptures and abstract drawings. Serra has lived on the Cape Breton Islands in Nova Scotia and Orient, New York on the northern tip of Long Island for decades and says he may have been looking for acquaintances in this unknown country.
Serra studied English literature in 1957 at the University of California, Berkeley and then transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara to earn a bachelor’s degree, helping himself by working in steel mills, which greatly influenced his future work. Serra graduated from the Yale School of Art and Architecture with a Master of Medicine, born in 1938 in San Francisco to a Hispanic father and a mother of Russian-Jewish immigrants.
Born on November 2, 1938 in San Francisco, Serra was the second of three children whose father Tony was a Spanish-born Balearican who worked as a master of a confectionery factory. In 1966, Serra created his first sculptures from materials such as fiberglass and rubber. In 1969, Serra began cutting, pocketing or folding lead sheets, rough lumber, etc. To create large, self-supporting dimensions.
Serra is widely known for its minimalist products made of large rolls and sheets of weatherproof steel, many of which are self-supporting [5], and around 1970 began to focus on large-scale sculpture for specific locations, often on a scale that belittles the viewer and emphasizes the viewer’s relationship with interior spaces and landscapes. Serra is perhaps his most famous work is massive hot-rolled steel sheets cast into intricate curves.
The Schunnemunk Fork, the site specific commission, is set on a ten-acre hilly field with a natural boundary of adjacent forests that was the southern boundary of the Storm King domain at the time of construction. The product consists of four hardened steel plates positioned longitudinally inserted in the ground.
The famous work of this period was to throw lead into the walls of his workshop ; Serras’ work has become known for its physicality since minimalism began ; but now it is compounded by the stunning size and weight that the pieces have taken on ; surface reflections are also unpredictable ; friends say it could be a storm.
The new work is modeled in a gallery style of an elongated S shape nearly six meters high and almost thirty meters long in two-inch weather-resistant steel (covered with a somewhat rough rusty patina) and in another, standing steel cylinders that vary in height and width but share the condition – as we are told and we can only believe – weights of fifty tons each.
Since then he has lived in New York, where he first used rubber in 1966 and in 1968 began applying his proprietary lead material. In New York, his circle of friends included Karl Andre, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Sol Levitt and Robert Smithson.
The historian and art historian Hal Foster presented Conversations on Sculpture, a new volume that brings together conversations between Richard Serra and Foster over a fifteen-year period. Serra received the J. Paul Getty Medal for his contribution to the arts in this year and at the 49th Venice Biennale received the Golden Lion for Contemporary Art in 2000.
MoMA enables audio archiving and selects copyrighted movies from our movie collection. All requests for an audio archive license or non-copyrighted films should be directed to Scala Archives at [email protected].
