Richard Serra – Sculpture Innovator
Richard Serra, one of the most significant figures in American Minimal Art, was only 36 years old when the Museum of Modern Art in New York planned to dedicate a first solo exhibition to his revolutionary sculptural work as early as the 1970s. William Rubin, the then director of the Department of Sculpture, remarked on the internationally celebrated work: “We felt that the pieces he had then been producing—most of them indoor and landscape-sited works—were of the highest order of creative energy and quality.” However, due to organizational reasons, the exhibition project at MoMA had to be postponed several times before it finally came to pass with the first American retrospective, “Richard Serra. Sculpture” in 1986. In the accompanying exhibition catalog, our work “No. 1” is published alongside “One Ton Prop (House of Cards),” also created in 1969, which has been in the MoMA collection since. “No. 1” was also part of the artist’s first American solo show, organized as early as 1969 by the Castelli Gallery in its legendary New York warehouse, dedicated solely to those monumental early, multi-part lead sculptures with which Serra would revolutionize the concept of sculpture. Some twenty years after his first solo exhibition, the MoMA dedicates another major retrospective, “Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years,” to his oeuvre, which transcends traditional spatial boundaries, once again celebrating him as a spectacular innovator of sculpture.


The early “Corner Props” series – Fragile aesthetics: a perfect symbiosis of balance and gravity
The “Props” series occupied a prominent part in the first MoMA exhibition in 1986; this groundbreaking body of work would go on to define Serra’s oeuvre from the late 1960s through the 1980s. Our three-part work titled “No. 1” is, along with “One Ton Prop (House of Cards)” (1969) from the MoMA’s collection, an early example from this revolutionary group of works, a large number of which are museum-owned today. What the sculptures in this series have in common is a captivating, fragile aesthetic that Serra derives through gravity and balance; this subtly orchestrated interplay lends Serra’s massive creations—composed of solid lead plates—a distinctive quality of fragility and transience despite their enormous weight. Serra establishes the intricate balance between the metal parts—held together solely by weight and gravity—in numerous construction drawings, thereby creating a radically new sculptural aesthetic and a form of construction. This goes far beyond Barnett Newman’s famous “Broken Obelisk,” in which the top is still firmly connected to the base by an internal steel core. Newman's fragile balance is thus merely an illusion, whereas Serra's famous “Props” become a fascinating reality. Richard Serra once described this seemingly ephemeral moment with the following words: “When something is truly balanced, it becomes weightless.” (R. S. 1983, quoted from Richard Serra. Writings/Interviews, p. 144). The meticulously balanced construction makes Serra’s massive, multi-ton arrangements appear uniquely weightless and fragile by staging the moment of perfect balance. Unsurprisingly, one of the works exhibited at MoMA at the time—comprising four steel plates leaning against one another—bears the title “One Ton Prop (House of Cards)” (1969/1986, Museum of Modern Art, New York), which pointedly addresses this apparent paradox. Serra's fascination has since been devoted to creating an aesthetic in which, as in our early “Prop” sculpture “No. 1,” collapse and transience are always present. Serra summarizes this implicit contradiction with the following words: “You can build a structure under compression that implies collapse and impermanence and yet, in its mere existence, denies this.” (R. S. 1983, quoted from: Richard Serra. Writings/Interviews, p. 144). Serra’s “Prop” sculptures do not stand on a pedestal; free interaction with the space is essential to them, and it is precisely this lack of boundaries that, when walking around them, inevitably gives rise to the feeling that they could suddenly lose their balance like a house of cards and crash to the ground with a loud bang.

Serra and the discovery of space – “No. 1” and Malevich’s “Black Square”
Starting with his works from the 1960s, Serra began to redefine the concept of sculpture; his works are not only designed to be viewed from all angles, but must be experienced within the space, surrounded, and – as in his more recent, space-filling steel sculptures – even traversed. Formally, Serra’s oeuvre belongs to the American Minimal Art movement. Always based on the contrast between the dark metal and the white space, the reduction of color—alongside the formal reduction to basic geometric forms—became a defining characteristic of Serra’s work. His sculptural oeuvre carries the principles of Constructivism and Suprematism—above all, the monochromaticism and sophisticated balance of Kazimir Malevich’s compositions—into three-dimensionality and monumentality. What both artists share is the active incorporation of space as an integral compositional element, a principle that makes Malevich’s work particularly significant for American Minimal Art.
Serra’s legendary “Prop” sculptures appear as a homage to Malevich’s famous painting “Black Square” (1915, first version), considered a key work of Modernism. Just as Malevich sought to free painting from the “burden of representationalism” with the “Black Square”, Serra strives to break down all the spatial constraints of sculpture.


Serra’s sculptural work – monumentality and aura
His work is not monumental in a way that feels oppressive; rather, it liberates and slows down the mind and senses in an almost meditative act of observation and comprehension. Serra’s sculptures and their interaction with space must be approached and understood through deep concentration. Since the late 1960s, Serra has invited us to wander among oversized lead and steel formations, to explore his masterful interplay of lightness and heaviness, and to discover shifting relationships and tensions within space that must be traversed in a contemplative act and experienced with the whole body. It comes as no surprise that one of Serra’s latest mega-creations, exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in 2021/22, bears the title “Transmitter” (2020, Gagosian Gallery, New York). Standing 4 meters tall, 17 meters wide, and 18 meters long, this structure—conceived from long, gently curved steel plates—spreads out into the space like a labyrinth, challenging our accustomed viewing habits and the limits of our sensory perception. “Transmitter” is yet another testament to the unique aura of Serra’s sculptural work, which defies any form of reproduction and can only be experienced in the presence of the original work. [JS]