Richard Serra has consistently and rigorously probed issues fundamental to sculpture over a career now spanning nearly six decades. In the late 1960s he introduced “process” into his sculptural practice by making explicit the means of his production. Between 1967 and 1968 Serra penned a list of transitive verbs, which he applied to new and innovative materials to make sculptures. Serra’s Scatter Piece (1968) is an example of this, consisting of rubber strips randomly distributed throughout the gallery. Serra’s work is on long-term view across five galleries at Dia Beacon.
Throughout his career, Serra’s work engaged with “ways of relating movement to material and space.” These concerns remained central to the steel sculptures he made in the 1990s and early 2000s. Ranging from Elevation Wedge (2001), a ramp that subtly inclines the floor of the gallery, to his monumental Torqued Ellipses series, these large installations of contorted steel plates elaborate concerns with orientation and movement, destabilizing our experience of space as we attempt to comprehend each sculptural volume. They are part of Serra’s investigation into the embodied experience of perception.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938. After graduating in 1961 with a degree in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, he studied art at Yale University, New Haven, until 1964, where he took classes with his future collaborator Josef Albers, among others. Serra spent two years traveling in Europe before settling in 1966 in New York, where he began to show his work in museums and galleries in 1967. From that point on, he exhibited extensively throughout the world, including representation in multiple editions of Documenta, Kassel, Germany; the Venice Biennale; and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial, New York. Retrospectives of Serra’s work have been organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1986 and 2007), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998). He also created numerous site-specific sculptures in public and private venues in both North America and Europe. In 1997, Serra’s first Torqued Ellipses sculptures were presented at Dia Center for the Arts, New York, and have been on permanent view at Dia Beacon since 2003 along with select works spanning his career. Serra died in Orient, New York, in 2024.
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