Richard Serra

Throughout a career that has spanned nearly half a century and ranged across mediums such as sculpture, drawing, experimental film, video, and large-scale public art, Richard Serra has insisted that the elements essential to any work of art include the qualities inherent in the materials used and the process of its making. In 1968 Serra executed numerous sculptures comprised of manipulated lead. These works realize in three dimensions a set of written instructions the artist began compiling the previous year. The list, which includes the verbs “to scatter, to roll, to fold, to spill” as well as select nouns suggesting terms “of context, of tension, of gravity,” signals both the undertaking of these works and the conditions within which they exist. For example, the sculpture Prop enacts the verb in its title: a large, rolled-up lead tube props up a square lead sheet placed against the wall. Prop operates in the specific “context” of the museum gallery, suspended in a state of “tension” as the two elements resist “gravity.”

The drawings Serra has made since the early 1960s, executed in charcoal, lithographic crayon, or oil stick applied to paper, linen, or cut canvas affixed directly to the wall, operate not as preparatory sketches for his sculptures but as independent objects. Untitled, one of the first drawings he made using an oil stick (oil paint hardened with wax), features a densely applied black triangle inscribed within the rectangle of the white paper. Despite the variety of pigments and application techniques he has utilized in drawings that vary from sketchbook-sized renderings to large-scale, site-specific installations, Serra consistently works in black. The color, he has argued, “is a property, not a quality,” one that allows him to explore the relationship of forms both to and in space.