Sculptor Richard Serra to live on through his art

American artist and sculptor Richard Serra has died at his home in Long Island, New York, at the age of 85.

Considered one of his generation’s greatest sculptors, the San Francisco native studied painting at Yale University but turned to sculpting in the 1960s, inspired by trips to Europe.

Serra was known for turning curving walls of rusting steel and other malleable materials into large pieces of outdoor artwork that are now dotted across the world.

The artist’s lawyer said the cause of death was pneumonia.

Known by his colleagues as the “poet of iron”, Serra became world-renowned for his large-scale steel structures, such as monumental arcs, spirals and ellipses.

He was closely identified with the minimalist movement of the 1970s.

Serra’s work started to gain public attention in 1981, when he installed a 120ft long and 12ft high curving wall of raw steel that splits the Federal Plaza in New York City.

The Tilted Arc sculpture generated a swift backlash from people working there as well as demands for it to be removed.

The sculpture was later taken down, but Serra’s popularity in the New York art scene had been cemented.

Most of Serra’s largescale works are welded in Cor-ten steel, but he also worked with other nontraditional materials such as rubber, latex and neon – as well as molten lead, which Serra threw against a wall or floor to create his “Splash” series in his early career. His works have been installed in landscapes and included in the collections of museums across the world, from The Museum of Modern Art in New York to the deserts of Qatar.

In 2005, eight works by Serra were installed permanently at Spain’s Guggenheim Museum.

Born to a Russian-jewish mother and a Spanish father in San Francisco, Serra was the second of three sons in the family.

He started drawing at a young age and was inspired by time spent at a shipyard where his father worked as a pipefitter.

Before sculpting, Serra worked in steel foundries to help finance his education at the University of California’s Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses. He went on to Yale, where he graduated in 1964.

ARTIST: Richard Serra became world-renowned for his large-scale steel structures.