This is the post I wrote for the First Street Gallery blog:
Richard Serra is one of my favorite
minimalist artists.
My first encounter, strangely enough, was a
rather offensive steel structure at the Tate Modern and I remember distinctly
thinking how dangerous and difficult it must have been to get that particular
mass and weight up to the fourth floor.
I was unnerved by the prospect of the process alone. Also I was very hesitant to go near it looking
as unstable as it does.
 |
| Trip Hammer, 1988, photo courtesy of http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-serra-1923 |
The second time was Inside Out, 2013, Weatherproof steel, at the 21st Street Gagosian. I was changed by walking through that
installation sculpture. Again I thought
about logistics at first, but there was a guard having a panic attack from
standing at the center of the warped space and I could feel the manipulation of
my own personal, comfortable space waxing and waning. It was incredible. Beautiful.
Indescribably intelligent. As a
painter, “manipulating the viewer” became a really important concept to how I
viewed and made art. Like all natural
wonders, Inside Out made me feel
insignificant.
Richard Serra’s drawings, Vertical and Horizontal Reversals, at David Zwirner were just as
incredible. The black pigment spread thick
like an exotic butter on raw whitepaper had my painting sensibilities
enraptured.
Richard Serra: Equal at David Zwirner was just as incredible
to me. Like childhood blocks, stacked high
only to be knocked down in a powerful swoop, giving the player confidence and
building the ego, these blocks are stacked but reverse the power lesson. These
blocks cannot easily be knocked down.
They are massive, weigh tons, and impress the viewer with the wonder of
those ideas. Like natural wonders, the
blocks effectively reduce the viewer to insignificance in the greater universe.
I do believe that Jerry Saltz put it best in his three
sentence review.
Photo: Richard Serra: Equal, David
Zwirner, New York, 2015 Photo by Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART, Courtesy of David
Zwirner, New York/London Artwork ? 2015 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York
Richard Serra: "Equal"
David Zwirner
537 W. 20th St., through July 24
“By now it's not unusual when confronting one of Richard Serra's gigantic,
metrically menacing, magnetically mighty curving steel sculptures, which are
simultaneously architectonic and geological, to walk all around its meandering
curves, maybe spot lovers kissing in the center of one, look at it in utter
awe, yawn, and say, "Great!" This new show consists of four huge
stacks of two cubic slabs, one atop another, and find Serra's mastery of
material, mass, gravity, density, and an almost uncanny not-thereness now
joined by ideas of the empty spaces between these shapes of steel and the
tremendous forces acting upon them — but nevertheless being empty presences,
interstices that you can look into and know in your body. This is his best show
in more than 15 years of great shows, and it resounds with a complexity and
cosmic instability not seen in solitary objects since Giorgio Morandi's
miraculous vibrating arrangements.” - Jerry Saltz
Richard Serra is at David Swirner
until July 24 but if you’re like me, don’t just go once!
For more information go to: http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/richard-serra-vertical-and-horizontal-reversals-2/
