Castle Street Review: Richard Serra and Creating His Huge, Awesome Sculptures


Cycle, 2011. Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo from Modern Painters.

Richard Serra's Drawing Retrospective opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Thursday, October 13 for a member preview. The exhibit traveled from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it opened in April 2011.

Serra is most famous for his large-scale steel sculptures, yet this exhibit goes behind the scenes of his process and into a different style of his art. Fifty drawings, some taking up a full wall of the museum, as well as the artist's private notebooks allows visitors a window into the early stages of Serra's creativity and planning. I was very happy to receive a membership to the museum for Christmas, so I was able to visit on a quiet afternoon.

Drawings after Circuit, 1972. From Modern Painters.

Serra explains the 18 drawings from the photo above, which are very large and take up a full wall in the SF MOMA exhibit. "The Circuit drawings are the result of mapping. They were an exercise for me, in that they recorded what I saw as I moved 360 degrees around the periphery of the room looking at the openings between the four plates of the sculpture."

The San Francisco exhibit coincides with two other exhibits opening this month, one at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain called "Constantin Brancusi and Richard Serra" and an exhibit of two new works at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Cycle, 2011, in the photo at the top of this post, is at the Gagosian. Serra is on the cover of the September 2011 issue of Modern Painters magazine, and the article in the magazine gave me context for the SF MOMA exhibit.


My Curves Are Not Mad, 1987. The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas

Last year, I visited the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and loved Serra's huge steel sculpture, My Curves Are Not Mad, in the museum's garden. I have sometimes struggled to really understand sculpture. The Drawing Retrospective as well as the recent press about Richard Serra have helped me to see that his sculpture is about space and how space can change with the addition of a sculpture.

Checking the echo in My Curves Are Not Mad

The drawings opened my eyes to the thought that goes into Serra's work and when I left the museum yesterday, I was exhausted. That is usually a sign that I have learned something that may take some time for me to process.