The American artist Richard Serra, known for his large works made with large pieces of metal, exhibited in squares and museums in many countries, died on Tuesday. Serra was one of the best-known contemporary sculptors in the world. According to the obituary of New York Times, «had invented a monumental environment made of immense curved corridors, ellipses and steel spirals that gave the sculpture a new abstract grandeur and a new physical intimacy». The artist was 85 and died at his home on Long Island, New York, due to pneumonia, his lawyer said.
Photo
One of his best known works, The matter of time, occupies the main atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and is made of 1,034 tons of oxidized steel. Like all of Serra’s works, it is designed to be erected without the need for supports or anchors, despite its reduced thickness.
The matter of time at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (Miquel Gonzalez/laif)
Serra was born in 1938 in San Francisco; His mother was of Russian Jewish origins, his father of Spanish origins. In the 1960s he was one of the artists of the New York underground scene and began to be known to a wider audience when in 1969 he was included in an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum dedicated to nine young emerging artists. In the following decade he began to create works of land artabstract art designed to occupy large outdoor spaces in harmony with the surrounding environment and, in the case of Serra, to be observed from multiple sides by people walking around.
Despite the large size of his works he was often associated with minimalism, the artistic movement born in the 1960s and whose exponents used common materials to create works with simple shapes.
The same by Richard Serra at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, November 13, 2020 (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Serra’s work that made him famous even among people with little knowledge of contemporary art was Tilted Arc, a 120-foot-long metal arch that was installed in New York’s Federal Plaza in 1981, in front of a government office building. The sculpture, which cut the square in two and forced those who had to reach the offices to take a longer journey, was contested for years until it was removed in 1989, after a trial. Since then it has no longer been exhibited, as requested by Serra himself.
Tilted Arc by Richard Serra in Manhattan, New York, in 1985 (NEAL BOENZI/The New York Times/Redux)
Continue on the Post
