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Indepth Arts News:
"Richard Serra"
1999-03-27 until 1999-09-17
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Bilbao, ,
ES Spain
One of the preeminent sculptors of the twentieth century,
Richard Serra (born in California in 1939) has long been
acclaimed for his challenging and innovative work, which
emphasizes the process of its fabrication, characteristics of
materials, and an engagement with viewer and site. In the early
1960s, Serra and the Minimalist artists of his generation turned
to unconventional, industrial materials and began to accentuate
the physical properties of their work. Relieved of its symbolic
role, freed from the traditional pedestal, and introduced into the
real space of the viewer, sculpture took on a new relationship to
the spectator, whose own experience of an object became
crucial to its meaning.
Viewers were encouraged to move
around--and sometimes on, in, and through--the work and
encounter it from multiple perspectives. Many of Serras
sculptures (including those on view) cannot be fully understood without a
peripatetic examination. Over the years Serra has expanded his spatial and
temporal approach to sculpture and has focused primarily on large-scale,
site-specific works, which create a dialogue with a particular architectural,
urban, or landscape setting.
The current exhibition presents Serras Torqued Ellipses, the artists most recent
ruminations on the physicality of space and the nature of sculpture. The ongoing
series of ellipses, eight of which are included in the exhibition, remain tied to the
artistic vocabulary Serra has developed over the past thirty years, but also
reflect a significant departure. While the physicality of space has long been a
concern for the artist, in these new works space has become his material.
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