Richard Serra was born
in San Francisco in 1939. After studying at the University of California
at Berkeley and at Santa Barbara, he graduated in 1961 with a BA
in English literature. During this time, he began working in steel
mills in order to support himself. In 1964, he graduated from Yale
University with both a BFA and an MFA. Receiving a Yale Traveling
Fellowship, he spent a year in Paris, followed by a year in Florence
funded by a Fullbright grant. Serra’s early work in the 1960s
focused on the industrial materials that he had worked with as a
youth in West Coast steel mills and shipyards: steel and lead. A
famous work from this time involved throwing lead against the walls
of his studio. Though his casts were created from the impact of
the lead hitting the walls, the emphasis of the piece was really
on the process of creating it: raw aggression and physicality, combined
with a self-conscious awareness of material and a real engagement
with the space in which it was worked. Since those Minimalist beginnings,
Serra’s work has become famous for that same physicality, but
one that is now compounded by the breathtaking size and weight that
the pieces have acquired. His series of “Torqued Ellipses”
(1996–99), which comprise gigantic plates of towering steel,
bent and curved, leaning in and out, carve very private spaces from
the necessarily large public sites in which they have been erected.
Serra’s most recent public work includes the 60-foot-tall “Charlie
Brown” (1999; named for the Peanuts comic-strip character in
honor of its author, Charles Schultz, who had died that year), which
has been erected in the courtyard of an office building in San Francisco.
He lives in New York and Nova Scotia.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Gagosian Gallery, New York |
