The sculptor who made minimalism monumental
Richard Serra created minimalist art with maximalist ambition. Widely considered one of the greatest sculptors of his generation, Serra often worked on a superhuman scale, using industrial materials such as weathered Cor-Ten steel to create imposing, daringly experimental behemoths that could weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds. In person, they dazzled viewers with their uncanny distortion of the environment: Stepping into the off-kilter steel curl of one Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, for example, makes the ground and sky feel similarly askew. “Space is my subject,” he said in 2001. “I use steel to organize space.”
The son of a Spanish-born father and a RussianJewish immigrant mother, Serra had a key formative experience on his fourth birthday, said Artforum. On a visit to the San Francisco shipyard where his father worked as a pipefitter, he saw a brand-new steel tanker take to the water and marveled at how “all weight seemed to leave it as it floated effortlessly.” In 1961, he won a scholarship to Yale to study painting, but switched to sculpture during a sojourn in Europe. When he landed in New York City in 1966, he began goading humble materials into visionary shapes—lifting a slab of vulcanized rubber into a cloak-like triangle, or flinging molten lead against a wall to create his late-1960s “splash” pieces. His “breakthrough sculpture,” 1971’s Strike: To Roberta and Rudy, featured an 8-foothigh, 24-foot-long steel sliver that bisected a room. His works would grow “ever more monumental” from there.
The “real-world consequences” didn’t always endear him to the public, said The Washington Post. In 1971, a rigger was killed when part of a multi-ton Serra sculpture fell and crushed him mid-installation. And 1981’s Tilted Arc, a “hostilelooking” 120-foot-long steel slab installed in a downtown Manhattan plaza, blocked pedestrian traffic and fueled an intense backlash. Some 13,000 people signed a petition for its removal; when it was removed, The Wall Street Journal ran an article with the headline “Good Riddance.” Still, attitudes toward contemporary sculpture “changed enormously over Serra’s career,” said The Telegraph (U.K.), and his Torqued Ellipses, begun in 1996, “converted even the most skeptical critics” and solidified his legacy. “It’s very, very hard to predict,” he said in 2021, “in terms of perpetuity, what’s going to last and what’s not.”