A sculptor’s very heavy exhibits.
What do we talk about when we talk about sculpture? Not weight, for sure.
But Richard Serra, unlike his modernist forebears, counts pounds. “This is my heaviest show ever,” he said with a hint of pride. The 80-year-old artist was in his New York studio preparing for a busy fall season. Three exhibitions of his new work will open simultaneously, in mid-September, at the Gagosian Gallery’s spaces in Lower Manhattan and on the Upper East Side.
Add to that the unveiling of a piece at the Museum of Modern Art. “Equal” (2015), an assembly of eight 36-ton forged-steel blocks that together weigh more than a Boeing 777, will occupy its own gallery in the new David Geffen Wing on October 21.
Mr. Serra, one of the best-known living sculptors in America, enshrines abstract forms as maximalist feats of mass and scale. His medium is steel.
Mr. Serra remains famous for a sculpture that no longer exists. “Tilted Arc,” a broad swath of steel, once bisected a plaza in Lower Manhattan. It spawned negative reviews from people who found it oppressive, and wanted it gone. In 1989, after years of debate, the sculpture was hauled off. The artist at the time likened the loss to a death in the family. “The government has it,” he said. “It’s their property and they destroyed it.” The federal agency that commissioned the piece said the sculpture is now in Virginia in three parts.
“Tilted Arc” continues to distort Mr. Serra’s reputation, fostering an image of an artist who taunted the public. His great innovation was to redefine sculpture by making it look less like a polished object than an off-putting incursion into the viewer’s space.
Mr. Serra has placed more than 100 commissioned sculptures from Philadelphia and São Paulo to the deserts of Doha. His forged pieces consolidate steel into masses of unrivaled denseness, while his plate-steel pieces tend to be lighter and more lyrical. These include his playful “Torqued Ellipse” series, looming ovoid structures whose rust-hued walls turn and twist.
Mr. Serra spent most of his childhood on the western edge of San Francisco. The family’s house was five blocks from the water. “I could look out of my bedroom window and see ships go by,” Mr. Serra recalled.
His mother, Gladys Fineberg, was of Russian-Jewish descent. His father, Tony, was a Spanish-American laborer who was born in Peru. For Mr. Serra’s fifth birthday, his father took him to the shipyards as a treat. Later, recalling the experience in a page-long statement titled “Weight,” Mr. Serra adopts a steel-plated oil tanker as his Proustian madeleine.
Mr. Serra arrived at Yale University as a graduate student, after earning a bachelor of arts in literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Settling in New York in 1966, he found his way to the avant-garde. Minimalism was the leading style. But in contrast to the crisp geometry of the Minimalists, Mr. Serra tried to get “down and dirty,” as he says now; he wanted to turn tightly sealed forms inside out.
He compiled a now historic list of 54 actions you can do with art materials (e.g., “to scatter,” “to weave,” “to stretch”). He then set out to enact them.
For Mr. Serra’s “splash pieces,” he heated sheets of lead in a caldron and, using a ladle, splashed the molten metal at the walls. Then he let it harden into long, ragged-edged metal casts that lay on the floor.
Mr. Serra’s sculptures are now fabricated in factories in Germany. “Forged Rounds” is the show that Mr. Serra had described as his heaviest ever. It consists of four massive sculptures composed from 21 forgedsteel “rounds,” or cylindrical drums, and part of its fascination lies in the perceptual riddle that allows rounds of varying dimensions — some the height of tables, others tall enough to take cover behind — to each weigh precisely 45 tons.
That sum reflects weight limitations imposed by New York and New Jersey. If they’re 45 tons, “they can go over the George Washington Bridge,” Mr. Serra said of his sculptures, which are trucked in from a port in New Jersey.
In a separate show at the Gagosian outpost at 522 West 21st Street, the entire space will be given over to a single Brobdingnagian sculpture — “Reverse Curve,” back-to-back plates that form an S-shape and wind, riverlike, for 30 meters.
At Gagosian’s Madison Avenue location, Mr. Serra will be showing “Triptychs and Diptychs,” 21 new works on paper. His drawings are fierce, large and tarry, all black on white.
After the debacle of “Tilted Arc,” Mr. Serra’s sculptures come with legal contracts. Owners, whether individuals or museums, are prohibited from moving or altering his work without his permission.
Even so, Mr. Serra said, “You make contracts, but you don’t know if they’re going to hold up after your demise or not.”