Richard Serra

Richard Serra, born in 1939, American sculptor, whose massive abstract works, mostly in steel or lead, are intended to convey a sensation of menace and transform the sites they occupy. Because of these qualities, his works frequently stir bitter controversy.

Serra was born in San Francisco, California. Supporting himself by working in steel mills, he attended the University of California at its Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses, earning a degree in English literature in 1961. He then studied under German-born American artist Josef Albers at Yale University, where he was awarded an M.F.A. (master of fine arts) degree in 1964.

After living in Europe for two years, Serra moved to New York City, where he was included in a 1968 exhibition at the influential Leo Castelli Gallery that showcased a group of artists who, like him, stressed creative process over finished works of art. In Splashing (1968, now destroyed), installed in the Castelli exhibition, he tossed molten lead at the juncture of floor and wall, where it solidified. Both the process, which could be considered a performance, and the mass of lead that resulted made up the piece.

Lead was the chief material in Serra's early work. He rolled it, cast it, and, in works such as One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), he balanced heavy sheets of it against one another. By the 1970s Serra had switched to steel, and his public installations began to attract attention, both favorable and unfavorable. In 1977 he placed four massive, rusting slabs of steel, entitled Terminal, at a busy intersection in the industrial town of Bochum, Germany. Local politicians stirred up controversy when they pointed to the piece as an inappropriately ugly symbol for a steel manufacturing city such as Bochum. In 1981 Serra created Tilted Arc, a huge, curved wall of steel erected in Federal Plaza in New York City, the favorite outdoor lunch spot of thousands of federal workers. The workers filed petitions to remove the sculpture, and heated arguments waged in both the press and the courts until the piece's court-ordered destruction in 1989. In Afangar (1990), nine pairs of huge stones installed on Videy Island near Reykjavík, Iceland, Serra began to exhibit a more lyrical tendency and the desire to use natural materials.