ART CITIES: London-Richard Serra

One of the preeminent sculptors of our era, Richard Serra, has long been acclaimed for his challenging and innovative work, which emphasizes materiality and an engagement between the viewer, the site, and the work. In the early 1960s, Serra and the Minimalist artists of his generation turned to unconventional, industrial materials and began to accentuate the physical properties of their art.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

An exhibition of six significant drawings by American artist Richard Serra is on view in London. Known for his large-scale, site-specific sculptures, Serra consistently produced drawings throughout his career. Beginning in 1971, the artist employed black paintstick (compressed oil paint, wax, and pigment) to create these works. “Six Large Drawings” is the last exhibition conceived by the artist during his lifetime. Reflecting a considered installation across both floors of the gallery, the presentation includes two of Serra’s large-scale diptychs from the early 1990s, two works from his series of “Greenpoint Rounds” (begun in 2009), and two multipanel “Rift”  drawings (begun in 2011). As Serra noted about the diptychs: “They are masses in relation to each other. They are not about composition or figure ground. They emphasize the comparison of different weights in juxtaposition”. He has also noted: “The construction of these large horizontal drawings refers to something I observed in Machu Picchu in Peru when I went there in 1974. The builders of Machu Picchu cut stones on the site and fit irregular shapes together; oftentimes, the edges only touch on one facet, and then there’s a void between them. It’s not that I went back to look at the notebook notations that I made in Cuzco when I started these drawings, but I’m sure it’s something that seeped into my memory. It is not that these horizontal constructions represent something I’d seen, but it means that there’s something in the reservoir of my understanding of how forms came together that I applied”. Since 1996, Serra revisited the circular format of ‘rounds’ in various iterations over the course of his career. On view are two works from the artist’s 2009 series of “Greenpoint Rounds”, which measure approximately eighty inches square. As he notes: “What happens in the [earlier Rounds] is that splatters, which are results of the process of making, start to animate the field. I’ve been working on a new series of large Rounds now since July [2009], trying to see if I could find a way to obliterate the shape even more, so that you are immediately drawn into the field of the drawing without focusing on the shape. What I tried to achieve with the Rounds was to make the mass flood the paper. I am trying to obliterate the shape to the degree that what you’re looking at is a black field in which a tremendous amount of matter is pulverized into the paperThe “Rifts” get their name from the distinctive white shapes (elongated triangles) that punctuate their otherwise unrelenting tarmac blackness, and perhaps from the geological term for a rent in the earth’s surface caused by moving tectonic plates. These sharp-edged triangular rifts are negative shapes, the white of the blank paper. An invention in drawing but one demanding their own rigor, they happen at the junction of two sheets of paper. The stringent intelligible structures of the “Rift Drawings” obstruct us from seeing their white divisions expressively as other kinds of rupture—psychological, historical, ontological. Yet minimal metaphors of drawing remain: tension, balance, presence, space. The imposing scale and gross materiality of the Rifts hover just long enough on this border, perhaps, to make us more conscious of the operations of metaphor in our relationship to drawing. The “Rift” drawings are formidable presences; they are typically at least 2.5 meters high, so giant in comparison to the standing spectator, and between 5 and 6 meters across, so capable of dominating the visual field of the viewe

Photo: Richard Serra, Triple Rift #2, 2018, Paintstick on handmade Japanese paper, 9 feet 3 inches × 22 feet (2.82 × 6.71 m), © Richard Serra/DACS, London, 2018, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 9/4-18/5/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/