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Updated Wednesday, March 27, 2024-07:33
Bilbao Richard Serra at the Guggenheim, reinventing the experience of seeing art
The American sculptor
Richard Serra
, a major figure in contemporary art with his monumental works created with rusty steel plates, died this Tuesday at the age of 85, according to US media reports.
Serra died of pneumonia at his home on Long Island, New York state, his lawyer, John Silberman, told The New York Times.
His surprisingly large pieces are
exhibited all over the world,
from the most important museums in Paris to the desert of Qatar, and his enormous, rounded, minimalist-looking works have sometimes caused controversy due to their imposing nature.
Born in the city of San Francisco in 1939, to a
mother of Russian Jewish origin and a Spanish father,
Serra obtained a scholarship in Paris and then settled in the 1960s in a New York in full artistic ferment.
At the end of that decade he published a manifesto followed by his founding work "One ton prop (House of cards)", four 122 cm square lead plates that remain balanced with their own weight, like a house of cards.
Then move on to the large orange-brown steel plates, displayed in New York, Washington, Bilbao and Paris.
Serra
designed sculptures specifically for the spaces they were going to occupy
, and said that he was interested in studying the interaction of his works with the environment.
"Certain things... stick in your imagination, and you need to reconcile yourself with them," Serra said in an interview with host Charlie Rose in the early 2000s.
In 2014, he even planted three dark towers in the sand of Qatar, so far away that you need a 4x4 vehicle and a map to reach the site, 70 km from Doha, the capital.
"When you look at my works, you don't remember an object. There remains an experience, a passage," said the artist in 2004.