Richard Serra, the sculptor celebrated for his pioneering large-scale steel artworks, has passed away at 85. His innovative works, which transformed landscapes around the world with their imposing steel forms, established him as a leading figure in contemporary sculpture by the late 1970s. His lawyer, John Silberman, confirmed in the New York Times that his cause of death was pneumonia. Serra was co-represented by David Zwirner and Gagosian—the latter of which first presented his work in 1983.
Born in San Francisco in 1938, Serra worked at steel mills in high school and during his studies at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara. Serra then attended Yale, originally intent on becoming a painter, before he shifted to sculpture in the 1960s after being inspired by European travels. Once he returned to New York, Serra began experimenting with metal, rubber, and fiberglass.
Serra quickly became synonymous with the minimalist movement of the 1970s, and garnered widespread recognition after the installation of Tilted Arc, a 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high plate of rust-covered steel in Foley Federal Plaza in Manhattan in 1981. By 1989, it was removed, following outcry from members of the public who argued in petitions that the sculpture was a nuisance. Still, the high-profile commission catapulted Serra’s name into the forefront of the art world.
“Richard Serra was a titan who transformed the very definition of sculpture and drawing,” said Larry Gagosian, founder of Gagosian. “More than that, he changed us, how we see and feel our way toward an experience that is elemental and sublime. He put us at the center of his art. Before material, space, weight, and measure, it was our experience that he cared most about.”
Serra’s permanent large-scale installations can be found at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, and the Serra Sculpture Park in St. Louis. In 2007, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
