Richard Serra
Sculptor
BORN NOVEMBER 2, 1938 – DIED MARCH 26, 2024, AGED 85
LIKE them or loathe them, Richard Serra’s large-scale metal structures now have pride of place in open landscapes and city museums across the world.
To his fans, the American artist’s sculptures are breathtaking in their beauty, as vast sheets of steel impossibly shaped into leaning curved lines or tightly-coiled circles.
Serra, nicknamed the “poet of iron”, invited his viewers to become part of his looming structures by experiencing discomfort, wonder and fear. His most famous work, The Matter Of Time at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, weighs 1,034 tons and can cause dizziness and claustrophobia with its eight winding passages.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco, the second of three sons to a Spanish immigrant father and Russian-Jewish mother. His father, Tony, was a pipe fitter for a shipyard and Serra recounted the impact of watching a ship liner launch as a young boy. He drew from a young age, encouraged by his mother.
Serra graduated in English literature at the University of California and studied fine art at Yale University. Winning a Fulbright fellowship to travel to Europe, he gained inspiration from his time spent with the composer Philip Glass. Following a visit to Madrid’s Prado Musuem, where he felt he could never match the insight behind Velázquez’s Las Meninas, he abandoned painting for sculpture.
He moved to New York in 1966 and came to prominence with Strike: To Roberta And Rudy, a slate of steel measuring 24 feet long that divides a room.
One of his final works was 2014’s East-West/ West-East in the Doha desert in Qatar.
Serra died of pneumonia. He is survived by his second wife, Clara Weyergraf, an art historian whom he married in 1981.