Artist Richard Serra, whose monumental, habitable sculptures distort our sense of space and time, died at his home in Long Island, New York, on Tuesday, March 26. He was 85 years old and the cause was pneumonia, his lawyer John Silberman told the New York Times.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938 and graduated with a degree in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, before studying painting at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, primarily under the guidance of Bauhaus alumnus Josef Albers. Despite this fundamental two-dimensional training, Serra became celebrated for his sculptural works, in particular his enormous installations made from cold-rolled industrial steel that was gently tilted or elegantly coiled into spirals. Robust and imposing, at once distant and inviting, they evoke sublime universes waiting to be discovered, rather than isolated works destined to be viewed from a distance.
The artist settled in New York in the mid-1960s, when Minimalism was gaining strength as an interesting alternative to the passionate Abstract Expressionism. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Serra opted for the courageous and procedural rather than the precise. It was during this period that he produced his so-called “List of Verbs”, writing down 54 actions such as “twisting”, “kneading”, “rotating” and “stretching” and promising to submit his artistic materials to each of them.
Today, a cursory search for “Richard Serra” on social media yields an endless stream of selfies and reverential, slow-moving videos, many of them filmed at Dia Beacon, where the artist’s “Torqued Ellipses” (1996–2000) and other works are on display. But these pieces were not always so well received. Standing 12 feet tall and 120 feet long, the rusty, wear-resistant steel sign titled “Leaning Arch” was met with reactions ranging from dismay to fury when it was unveiled at Manhattan's Foley Federal Plaza in 1981. Nine years and one controversial lawsuit later, it was removed to the relief of hundreds of government officials who had requested its removal, stored and never shown publicly again.
Perhaps Serra's most underrated work is his short film 'Television Delivers People” (1973), produced in collaboration with Carlota Fay Schoolman. The seven-minute piece, a critique of mass media in the style of a public service announcement with an eerie elevator music soundtrack, was broadcast to the public – a successful example of insertion into mainstream channels to subvert it. them and disturb them.
Source: HiperAllergic