Richard Serra (1938)
United States
Biography :
"Born in 1939 in San Francisco (CALIFORNIA, United States), lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia (Canada)
American artist born in 1939, Richard Serra is one of the most important sculptors of the second half of the 20th century, whose work, composed of imposing structures in metal, steel and lead, is associated with the post-minimalist movement.
In 1961, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature from the University of Berkeley in California. The same year, he left for New Haven, Connecticut and enrolled at Yale University to pursue a Bachelor's degree and then a Master's degree in arts. He also worked in parallel at this time in steelworks in order to finance his studies, renewing in a certain way the moving and determining vision that the visit to a shipyard gave him at the age of four, the workplace of his father.
Exhibited temporarily or permanently throughout the world, Richard Serra's work has been notably visible at the Center Pompidou (1993), at the Guggenheim in Bilbao (permanent installation entitled The Matter of Time, 2005) as well as within the framework of the Monumenta at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2008.
Richard Serra's first works date from 1967 and involve a wide variety of materials (rubber, fiberglass, latex, neon, etc.) which he assembles according to an experimental and random principle often affiliated with anti-form. More attentive to the process than to the form of his sculptures, Richard Serra worked in the years 1968-1969 on several series, of which the scatter pieces, castings and splashings constitute the major manifestations. He conceives his works as so many ephemeral interventions (which can nevertheless be reproduced later) and specifically linked to their place of conception, site-specific. From 1969, he created Props, minimalist steel sculptures composed of an assembly of trays, rollers, rectangles, even pipes, supported by lead rods. One Ton Prop, from 1969, subtitled House of Cards, is the most famous example as it illustrates the dramatic tension at work in Richard Serra's installations, whose apparent precarious balance creates danger and insecurity. Alongside the collaborations he leads with musicians (like Philip Glass) and artists (Serra participated in the construction of the Spiral Jetty in 1970 with Robert Smithson), the artist developed a number of interventions in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly outdoors, in urban or natural environments, taking into account the specific qualities of steel, namely its evolution over time (oxidation, rust, chromatic loss). In 1981, in the heart of New York, he designed the Tilted Arc on Federal Plaza. Thirty-seven meters long and three meters high, the work blocks the view and the passage of the square, provoking the anger of local residents, little sensitive to its radicalism, causing it to be dismantled in 1989, following of a petition. Inevitably associated with his monumental sculptures, Richard Serra also produces a film work (Hand Catching Lead, 1968) and above all a significant production of drawings, the latter having been favored by a retrospective exhibition at MoMA in 2010."
(Source, website, Contemporay Art Institute of Villeurbanne)