Richard Serra (American)

Richard Serra (b.1939) is one of today’s pre-eminent sculptors. He is acclaimed for his challenging and innovative work, which emphasises process, materials, and an engagement with viewer and site. Richard Serra was trained as a painter at Yale University, completing his M.F.A. in the early 1960s. Working with unconventional industrial materials, Serra began to accentuate the physical properties of the work. His first solo exhibition was at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York where his sculptures, created from fibreglass, rubber and neon, broke with traditional definition of sculpture by presenting these on the wall. Serra was included in Nine Young Artists: Theodoron Awards at the Guggenheim. Having produced the first of many short films in 1968, he experimented with video. He was intrigued by urban sites, and in 1970 installed a piece on a dead-end street in the Bronx. Serra later expanded his spatial and temporal approach to sculpture, focusing on large-scale, site-specific works that create a dialogue with a particular architectural, urban, or landscape setting. Serra has continued to exhibit in such venues as Leo Castelli Gallery and Gagosian Gallery, New York. Over the years Serra has been awarded prizes all over the world. He continues to produce large-scale steel structures both in the United States and Europe. His abstract works achieve interaction by the individual walking in and around the sculptures. Serra can be characterised as an influential artist who has both radicalized and extended the definition of sculpture through extraordinary invention and vision.