He emphasized the visual lightness of his works, which weighed up to hundreds of tons and where the experience of the visit was often forever imprinted in the hearts of the viewer. On Tuesday, March 26, the internationally acclaimed American artist died of pneumonia in Orient, New York, at the age of 85.
Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, major retrospectives at the Center Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Arts in New York, gigantic permanent installation of spirals and labyrinths at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, monumental commission for steel walls for the Grand Palais in Paris or towers in Sands of Qatar… Luckily for him, Richard Serra was able to benefit from his entry into art history as one of the greatest sculptors of his time during his lifetime. An artist who created shapes never seen before by twisting volumes.
Richard Serra was born on November 2, 1938 on the west coast of San Francisco and studied fine arts at Yale in the South before living and working in New York on the East Coast of the United States. Is it this life fueled and moved by the different geographical poles that can be found in his works and is celebrated for their strong and mysterious tension?
A steel monster washed ashore
Everyone who met him remembers the steely look in Richard Serra’s blue eyes. As the son of a Jewish mother from Odessa in the Ukraine and a father of Spanish origin from Mallorca, little Richard had a connection to the shipyard in San Francisco. At the age of 4, where his father worked, he saw a battleship leaving the shipyard. To be confronted with a steel monster washed up on the ground and to feel the tremor of meaning through the material associated with it, an experience that has never left the artist. It is no coincidence that he worked in a steel mill every summer when he was young…
When Serra posed for the demonstration in 2008 Monuments In the 13,000 square meters of the Grand Palais in Paris, there are five steel plates, both thin – with a thickness of only 13 centimeters – and gigantic – 17 meters high and 4 meters wide, each weighing 73 tons – he explained his gigantic installation to RFI promenade : « The content of the work lies with you as the viewer. And not in these big plates. The theme is the experience you have when you enter and move within that space. This is your experience with this work. These five steel plates mean nothing. The true content of the work is the viewer moving through the work. The experience he has had over time. Time becomes a value in itself. »
An intimate feeling turned into collaborative work
With each creation, Richard Serra wants to evoke an intimate feeling in the viewer in a public place, which should transform into a collaborative work. An equation that doesn’t always work the way he imagined or hoped. Some of his installations trigger strong reactions. The most symbolic example is his monumental sculpture Tilted bow, inaugurated in 1981 in Federal Plaza, a business district in New York, and was quickly fought over by local residents. Eight years later and after numerous petitions and legal battles against the work, the artist was forced to dismantle this 3.6 meter high and 36.6 meter long metal plate. And many other pieces by Serra cause incomprehension: Octagon for Saint EloiFor example, in 1991 it was installed in the church square of Changy in Saône-et-Loire in France and was nicknamed “the bolt” by the residents.
In Berlin, however, it was he himself who withdrew his project for the Holocaust memorial after an argument. When his project was changed, Serra withdrew it in the late 1990s. for private and artistic reasons “. On the other hand, the idea of depicting a sea of steles remained.
The shock of the Brancusi workshop in Paris
Serra has created sculptures for more than a hundred public places, from Philadelphia and Saint-Louis to New York, Paris, Berlin and Bilbao to São Paulo. But Richard Serra maintained a special relationship with France. In 1965, thanks to a scholarship, he discovered the work of Giacometti, one of his masters, whom he called “ Hours of watching in the dome, like a groupie ” he told RFI.
But Paris is above all the shock of Brancusi’s studio, recreated in the National Museum of Modern Art. His encounter with the work of the great Romanian artist would be decisive in the painter’s decision to become a sculptor again. But where Brancusi has stood out for the search for elegance and lightness with his bases and his way of purifying his subjects and drawing a line in space, like thatBird in space, Serra will do the opposite. He is looking for form, not image. Through the balancing act and the immense weight of his steel plates, the American artist often tried to create a feeling of insecurity and anger in the viewer.
In Spain, his father’s country of birth, he found another key element of his future artistic approach. Las Meninas von Velásquez made it clear to him how important it is to involve the viewer in the design and perception of the work: “ I stared at it for a while before realizing that I was an extension of the screen. It was a revelation. »
A balance that is both menacing and poetic
Before steel became his favorite material, he also used rubber and liquid lead. In a daily interview The worldIn 2008 he explained how steel came into his life: “ One day, as I was setting up a lead plate in the corner of the workshop I was in with Jasper Johns, I saw that it was standing alone and vertically. Then I received large steel plates: this is the origin of these pieces (Strike), which are inserted without attachment in the corner of a room and change the perception. »
In 1969 he created his founding work, One-ton drop (“House of Cards”), endowed with an apparent fragility worthy of a house of cards. In fact, he positions four lead plates so that they only support each other. From now on he will make his signature out of this equally threatening and poetic balance.
In 1997, Documenta in Kassel, one of the largest contemporary art fairs in the world, had to order a crane to lift and celebrate the more than 100 tons of steel of Richard Serra’s work.
After his death, his creations truly become “self-sustaining” works. But even without the master’s support, his monumental sculptures made of orange-brown steel will continue to stir the emotions of viewers.
