ART CITIES:London-Richard Serra

As a child Serra would often visit Californian shipyards, and later funded his college studies by working in steel mills. Perhaps this explains his affinity for large-scale engineering and his ability to create art by taming the geometries of massive steel structures.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Richard Serra is not a particularly prolific artist – quite understandable given the scale of his individual works. His works are usually large, site-specific sculptures for architectural, urban and landscape settings. Comprising three new works, Ramble (2014), Dead Load (2014) and London Cross alongside the older Backdoor Pipeline (2010) each is significant in scale and ambition. Richard Serra’s quartet of steel works at Gagosian weighs 230 tones, demanded the demolition then reconstruction of most of the gallery’s walls, and during installation closed traffic on Britannia Street. No wonder Serra has never had a museum retrospective in the UK and h . as not exhibited in London since 1992. Serra’s sculpture explores the exchange between artwork, site, and viewer and the group of pieces here cleverly explore this relationship in very different ways.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia Street, London, Duration:11/10/14 -4/3/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com