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by Manos Angelakis
Richard Serra
A major forty-year retrospective of Richard Serra’s oeuvre, monumental sculptures as awesome as the Egyptian pyramids, is installed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Three new pieces of his immense cocoa-colored steel structures are more sensational than anything he had produced to date.
On the Museum’s top floor, a selection of early works from 1966 to 1986 begins with a 26-foot-long, 10 foot-wide slab of hot-rolled steel, at first appearing completely mundane, until you look up and discover its mirror image on the ceiling above your head. In another gallery on the same floor, early examples of the “Prop Pieces” series (generally groups of four free standing lead plates combined into open, semi-open and closed squares) explore solutions to the problem of balancing four metal pieces weighing approximately one ton, unsupported and depending on gravity and the weight of the material, to be held in position.
Mr. Serra attempts in his latest creations to use sculptural form to make space distinct. The three new sculptures on view in the Contemporary Galleries on the second floor were all created in 2006. “Sequence” a spiral-within-a-spiral, “Band” and “Torqued Torus Inversion” are steel constructs displaying a graceful buoyancy that belie their own weight and volume in a seemingly impossible fashion. Long, undulating ribbons of weathered steel, suggest curves enclosing spatial volumes with no beginning and no end.
MoMA has also temporarily removed all of the sculptures from the outdoor garden to display two Serra pieces in its collection that have never been exhibited in the past.
Perhaps Mr. Serra is best known to the average New Yorker from the infamous “Tilted Arc” acrimonious public debate. The steel wall installed in New York’s Federal Plaza in 1989, was removed by court order after an almost decade long fight. The site-specific work is now dismantled and stored. Also missing from the retrospective are the early “splash” pieces with which Mr. Serra established his reputation.
The show, that contains 27 pieces, was assembled by MoMA’s curator-at-large Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cook, curator of the Dia Art Foundation.
© July 2007 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.
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