Making sculpture is a lifelong commitment.” Richard Serra, who died on Tuesday at the age of 85 due to pneumonia, kept the promise until the end and when his strength weakened and he abandoned his monumental sculptures, increasingly powerful and always at the limit of what he is possible, he threw himself into drawing, an activity that accompanied him from the beginning and to which he always turned in search of inspiration.
The famous art critic Robert Hughes had crowned him “the best sculptor of the 21st century”, and his works, which you have to walk through or around, are in numerous collections and museums around the world . Sculptures that Serra took down from the pedestal, in which the viewer stops being a passive element and becomes an active subject and makes us aware of where we are and how our sensations change as we move.
One of the most acclaimed works, and of which the sculptor was particularly proud, is The Matter of Time (2005), created especially for the Guggenheim Bilbao, a 1,034-ton circular labyrinth made up of curved and inclined steel plates skating rink that has become an icon of the museum, at the height of the architecture of Frank Gehry, whom Serra thought did not make sculptural buildings, but “set design, ornament”.
With great intellectual strength and deep convictions, he never stopped saying what he thought, even though that didn’t exactly win him friends. His father, a Majorcan who had emigrated to the United States, where he married a young woman from the Russian area of ??Odessa, now Ukraine, worked as a pipe fitter in a shipyard in San Francisco and then during the war he was foreman of a candy factory. Serra remembered that those visits to the shipyards as a child would change his life. He first wanted to be a painter, but gave up when he saw Velázquez at the Prado. “When I saw Las meninas I thought there was no way I would get close to it. The viewer in relation to the space, the painter included in the painting, the mastery with which he could move from an abstract landscape to a figure or a dog… This practically stopped me. Cézanne hadn’t stopped me, De Kooning or Pollock hadn’t stopped me, but Velázquez seemed like something more important to contend with. This nailed the painting’s coffin. When I returned to Florence, I took everything I had and threw it into the Arno. I thought it would be better to start from scratch, so I started playing with sticks, stones, wires, cages and live and stuffed animals,” he explained to Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker.
After this European adventure, where he made almost daily visits to Constantin Brancusi’s reconstructed studio in Paris, Serra settled permanently in New York. He attracted attention for the first time in 1968 at Leo Castelli’s gallery with his films and a piece in which he threw molten lead at the wall. But the best was yet to come. He led what would be the great aesthetic revolution that, in the seventies, redefined what sculpture was. It was no longer about offering objects for contemplation (as did Bernini and Rodin or even Giacometti and David Smith), but about transforming our perception of what is sensible, of space and our place within his.
His sculptures are distributed in museums and public spaces all over the planet, both in museums and in outdoor spaces, from The Wall, in La Verneda, to the Qatari desert, where there is his last and controversial major work, a 2014 installation of four monoliths that he titled East-West/West-East.
His intervention in the Arab emirate was the subject of numerous criticisms, but nothing comparable to the controversy that caused the sculpture Tilted arc in Manhattan. Surely, the biggest setback of his long career. The rusted steel wall 37m long and 4m high that he had designed was removed in 1989 following a tumultuous public debate (the workers in the square where it was installed considered it a danger, in addition of an aesthetic horror). A legal process was then opened, the sculpture was dismantled and the pieces were cornered in a hangar, but that resolution served to draw up a law to protect the rights of artists over their works.
Serra, who always aired the admiration he felt for Oteiza – “At fifty he was the most progressive sculptor on the planet”, he assured – is widely represented in Spain, with works in museums such as the Macba, the Bellas Artes de Bilbao or Queen Sofia. In the latter, he was the unwitting protagonist of one of the most improbable but true stories in the art world: the magical disappearance from a warehouse, sometime between 1992 and 2005, of Equal parallel / Guernica-Bengasi (1986), a set made up of four massive blocks of skateable steel (38 tons of weight). An unresolved plot – it came out for renovations and nothing more has ever been known about it – that the writer recounted in Obra maestra. Resigned to the inevitable, Serra agreed to make a twin work, which has been exhibited at the museum since 2008.
