Richard Serra: Sculpture

Since the early 1970s, Richard Serra has used hot rolled and forged steel to make sculptural works that emphasize the physical process of their creation, consistently exploring the possibilities of form and matter.

The largest single forged round by the artist to date, Serra’s 2022 (2020–2022) comprises one forged steel cylinder placed centrally in the gallery.

Texts throughout are quotes from the artist.

2022, 2020-2022

Forged steel

120 1/4 inches (305.4 cm) high x 78 1/2 inches (199.4 cm) diameter

“Weight is a value for me—not that it is any more compelling than lightness, but I simply know more about weight than about lightness.… It is the distinction between the prefabricated weight of history and direct experience which evokes in me the need to make things that have not been made before.”

Richard Serra and Donald Judd at Judd’s studio, New York, 1972

“What [Judd, Flavin, and Andre] had done is take the work off the pedestal, thus putting the emphasis on the object. What they hadn’t done was emphasize the making of the object itself...So I compiled a list of verbs and actions I thought I could perform in relation to matter and in relation to space.”

Richard Serra, Verb List, 1967. Graphite on paper. Two sheets, each: 10" x 8" (25.4 x 20.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Those words don’t give definition to a work; they give definition to a process.… They lead to actions, not concepts or statements, and those actions bring in the properties of materials.”

Segment from Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf-Serra's Steelmill/Stahlwerk, 1979. Film, 16 mm, black and white, sound, 29 min. This clip shows the forging of Berlin Block (For Charlie Chaplin), 1977, the artist's first forged sculpture

“When we did the piece for Documenta [in 1977] … I saw the forge while I was there, and I’d never seen a machine like that.… I wanted to make something that in its own right would hold its volume and its weight and specify a certain gravity.”

Forging Berlin Block (For Charlie Chaplin), 1977. Photo by Knut Garthe

Berlin Block (For Charlie Chaplin), 1977, forged steel, 75 x 75 x 75" (190.5 x 190.5 x 190.5 cm), installed in front of Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photo: Reinhard Friedrich

“Bringing the methods of industry into art, as well as the mechanics of building, certainly interested me. The history of sculpture hadn’t really dealt with steel; that was my opening.”

Forging of One, 1987-88. Photo by Werner Hannappel

“One thing that distinguishes my work is that I’ve always considered weight to be a grounding principle: weight or the absence of weight.”

Richard Serra, One, 1987-1988, Forged steel, 70 3/4 x 82 3/4 inches (180 x 210 cm), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands. Photo by Dirk Reinartz

Richard Serra, Two Forged Rounds (For Buster Keaton), 1991, Forged steel, Two (2) rounds, each: 64 x 88 1/2 inches (162.6 x 224.8 cm). Photo by Huger Foote

Installation view, Richard Serra, Four Rounds, Equal Weight, Unequal Measure, David Zwirner, New York, 2017

“I want to make the volume of the space tangible, so that it is understood immediately, physically, by your body; not so that the sculpture is a body in relation to your body, but that the volume, through the placement of the sculptural elements, becomes manifest in a way that allows you to experience it as a whole.”

“To understand [the rounds] demands sustained attention—that you twist and turn and rotate as you observe the work from the center and around each element.… You feel the mass of your own body as compared to the mass of each round.”

Installation view, Richard Serra: Sculpture, David Zwirner, New York, 2022

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2022, 2020-2022

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