Richard Serra's iconic monumental Minimalist constructions, typically comprised of self-supporting, shaped and angled corten steel plates, challenge sculptural conventions of scale, material, and subject matter, as well as viewers' perceptions of gravity, bodily alignment, and planar space.
Read MoreSerra's 'Prop' pieces in the late 1960s, in which rolls of lead and sheets of other metals were arranged in configurations held together only by gravity, were precursors to the increasingly large-scale public work that developed when in the 1970s he turned his attention outdoors.
Moving out of the gallery space Serra began creating monumental sculptures in the form of long, curving, horizontal or tall, and seemingly precarious (but partially buried) continuous steel sheets. Serra's works from the 1970s onward responded to, but jarringly altered, the landscapes and urban public places in which they were installed.
In the 1980s, as Serra's large-scale works were being taken to new heights and becoming commonplace across Europe, he encountered controversy in the United States with the installation of Tilted Arc (1981), a 3.7-metre-high, rusted corten steel arc crossing New York's Foley Federal Plaza. Disputes between the civic authorities, the public, and the artist resulted in its dismantlement in 1989, and carried on after.
Since the early 1970s Richard Serra has also produced dark drawings made with black paintstick, ink and paint on paper and canvas, as well as prints. These two-dimensional works evoke the same approach to time, process and materiality that define his sculpture.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Serra also made experimental films and videos. An early example is the self-explanatory 16mm, black-and-white film, Hand Catching Lead (1968), most of these films involved carrying out short bursts of manual tasks or actions within a limited time frame.
Since the early 1990s, Serra's sculpture has taken new forms such as the open-but-enveloping 'Torqued Ellipse', and solid circular forged steel 'Rounds'. Serra also made several 'Rounds' prints, in a hands on process that produced textured black-hole like circles on paper. Richard Serra's Transmitter (2020), while differing from the exact Torqued Ellipse shape, follows the same semi-closed enveloping approach to space.
Serra continues to show his drawings and monumental sculptural installations in galleries, sculpture parks and public spaces around the world.
Over the course of his more than five decade career, Richard Serra has been comissioned to produce numerous artworks for public spaces. His monumental steel constructions can be found in public locations across the globe from France to New Zealand.
Alongside the infamous Tilted Arc, other examples that generated less controversy include the towering Fulcrum (1987), near Liverpool Street station in London; Wake (2003), with its five pairs of closed-form S-shapes in Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park, the colossal 180-tonne Snake (1997) permanently installed at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the 80-foot 7 (2011) for the Museum of Islamic Art Park, in Doha.
