Floor 4: Richard Serra (exiting Close)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Richard Serra Gallery. Serra's large metal sculptures and monumental painting on the near wall create a sense of grandness, weight, and heft in this space.
You've entered from the back right corner of this long rectangular gallery, facing the short, far front wall. The gallery has one large drawing, four sculptures, and an artist panel with a video about Serra, which is on the middle of the left wall. To access the audio, use the handheld listening device attached to the panel.
The exit to the Brice Marden Gallery is in the middle of the left wall of the gallery, next to the artist panel and video. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"Artists who had used steel before did not deal with its tectonic potential, its weight, its compression, its mass, its stasis— that wasn’t knowledge that was in the art world."
—Richard Serra, 2006
Richard Serra
Born 1938, San Francisco; died 2024, Orient, New York
As a child, Richard Serra visited the San Francisco shipyards where his father worked as a pipe fitter; later, he worked in steel mills in the East Bay to support his college studies. These experiences informed his approach to using industrial materials once he began making sculpture in New York in the mid-1960s. Throughout his long career, he dedicated himself to exploring the elemental qualities of materials and their responses to the laws of physics. From his early rubber casts and metal props through the increasingly massive works of his later decades, Serra made invisible properties such as weight, balance, pressure, and gravity both visible and deeply felt.
Related Media
Transcript
Richard Serra:
When I first started working, I started working in rubber, and then I immediately wanted to use the entropy of rubber and the possibility of manipulating rubber in a more flexible, dense material. And I found the only material I could go to that had some at least some possible stasis, and possible strength was lead. And I could hand manipulate the lead, and yet I could build structures with it.
After a point I got, I wanted to enter into and through the pieces. I wanted to make spaces that you could actually be contained in, and I wanted spaces that you can walk through and around. After a point I got, I wanted to enter into and through the pieces. Lead being a product of very low entropy means that after a while it's going to decay. You can't have pieces, people walking through pieces that are inherently unsafe. So I had to go back to steel.
As a kid, I had worked out here for a lot of steel mills. I think I had an advantage to doing that because I wasn't frightened of it, because I was around it all my life because when I was 16, 17, I built the Crown Zellerbach Building in San Francisco with rivets.
Later on, when I went to college, I worked with the LA County Museum at Kaiser. So for me, going into a steel mill is very familiar. It's like a bakery; it's about rolling and cutting and pouring. There's nothing very complex about it. And what I had thought is that the Industrial Revolution really had used steel in a way that artists hadn’t. It had used steel to really build the United States; it had used steel for bridges and silos and skyscrapers. I really wanted to use steel in the way that it had been used for the potential for building.
Objects
5 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1989
Paint stick on paper
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1990
In addition to sculpture, Serra made drawings throughout his career. Beginning in 1971, he used heavy layers of black paint stick to give a flat surface a sense of weight. Here, he contrasts two different-size sheets of paper, recalling other works that carefully balance pieces of lead or steel against one another. The title refers to his sculpture Tilted Arc, which was installed in New York’s Federal Plaza in 1981 but then criticized as disruptive to the function of the space. In 1989, after years of public debate, the government removed the work—in Serra’s view, destroying it.
Visual Description
Spanning over nine feet tall and fifteen feet wide— about the size of a small movie theater screen—this large, paint stick-on-paper drawing features two vast, matte-black rectangular fields that sit side by side within a thin, light wood frame.
This piece is a horizontal diptych in which two sheets of paper have been mounted side-by-side, with adjoining edges at the center, to form one piece. Each sheet of paper contains a matte-black rectangular field. A narrow, slightly irregular vertical gap runs down near the center of the two rectangular fields, marking the join between them. The gap becomes narrower as it descends, ultimately disappearing where the two rectangles meet, about halfway down their full height.
At the top of the piece, the left black rectangular block begins a little lower than the right, creating a horizontal band of off-white paper along the top left margin, while the right block reaches closer to the upper edge.
The black surfaces are not flat. Faint vertical striations, smudges, and variations in density produce a texture that subtly shifts in tone from charcoal to deep black. The edges of the black areas are rough, especially along the top and bottom, where the pigment stops unevenly and tiny flecks of pale paper show through. A broad off-white paper border surrounds the black fields on all sides, most visible along the top and bottom.
A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.
Artwork Label Text
1969/1978
Lead antimony
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
While some of Serra's "props," like the nearby Floor Pole Prop and Melnikov II, lean against one or more walls of a room, this work relies on its own individual parts to stand up. The four heavy lead plates lean against one another in a seemingly delicate balance. While they may appear at risk of toppling over, their counterbalanced weight creates a stable structure.
Visual Description
Four thick plates of lead stand directly on the gallery floor and lean against one another to form a large, box-like enclosure with an open top and empty center. The enclosure stands about chest-height on an average adult and about as wide as their outstretched arms. The panels all slightly slant inward rather than being perfectly vertical, resulting in narrow triangular gaps between them that increase as they approach the floor. At their tops, the plates slightly overlap one another rather than meeting at perfect ninety-degree corners. There are no visible fasters, braces, or supports of any kind.
The metal surface is dark charcoal to bluish gray with a matte, oxidized look, marked by irregular streaks, scuffs, and lighter gray patches that suggest abrasion, casting residue, or weathering. The edges are not perfectly straight but somewhat jagged.
This work, along with another nearby large sculpture (Melnikov II), is set behind a museum rail that extends across this section of the gallery.
Artwork Label Text
1987
Weatherproof steel
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1988
This massive T form is held in place by the surrounding walls and floor, as well as by the force the two identically sized steel plates exert upon one another. Melnikov II is one of a number of prop pieces by Serra that occupy the corner of a room. Much like Dan Flavin’s corner arrangements of fluorescent light (an example is on view nearby), these works make use of—and transform—the corner. This sculpture is named after Russian Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov (1890–1974), whose structures featured dynamic geometric forms, some of which project outward without visible support.
Visual Description
Two large rectangular metal plates are arranged into a T-shaped configuration in one corner of the gallery. The flat slabs are identically sized—each higher than a tall door and almost twice as wide—but are placed in different orientations. One of them is set directly on the floor on one of its short edges and stands upright, eight feet high. It is angled at a forty-five-degree angle to—and spaced out from—the room's corner, so that it is equidistant from the two nearby room walls. The second plate rests on top of the first and is positioned horizontally, parallel to the floor and ceiling. In addition to being supported by the vertical plate at its center, it is held in place by the two converging walls of the room, which it meets at its two back corners. While the two plates intersect at each other's midpoints, they overlap each other only halfway: the lower, vertical slab extends further out, while the upper, horizontal slab extends further back.
The weatherproof steel is matte and has a warm, dark orange-brownish patina. Its textured surface has various irregularities resulting from the industrial process. The overall appearance of the two plates changes depending on one's viewing angle; seen more the side, they read as flat geometric planes, while seen head on they become lines in space.
This work, along with another nearby large sculpture (House of Cards), is set behind a museum rail that extends across this section of the gallery.
Artwork Label Text
1966–67
Rubber, resin, and fiberglass
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1992
While living in Lower Manhattan, Serra was rummaging through debris around the abandoned Hudson River piers and stumbled across a pair of discarded doors that he brought back to his studio. The casts of these doors, seen here, use humble materials to capture the ruined state in which the originals were found. Despite its parallels with the concept of the readymade—a found object an artist designates as a work of art—Serra's sculpture was definitely fabricated, reflecting the artist's interest in, in his words, "the invention of form."
Visual Description
This sculpture—similar in size to a door turned on its side, but extending several feet longer—consists of four horizontally-oriented, uniformly-sized rectangular panels made of rubber, resin, and fiberglass. These slabs are set directly on the floor on their long edges and lean against a gallery wall.
They overlap each other so that some of the panels do not touch the wall but rather rest against the others. Each panel measures approximately three feet tall, nine feet wide, and two inches deep. Their colors are a muted gray-brown and are uneven throughout; one of the panels on the left side has a warmer, more umber hue with specks of orange.
Their surfaces are matte and they display visible textures and irregularities resulting from their casting process, including tears, holes, and areas of indentation. The edges are rough and jagged. Presented together, the four components share consistent dimensions and materials while retaining individual surface variations resulting from their casting.
Artwork Label Text
1969
Lead
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
In the 1960s, Serra compiled a list of verbs—such as to roll, to crease, to fold, and to bend—that helped him transform his materials. As he reflected, "Once you understood the basic lesson that procedure was dictated by material, you also realized that matter imposed its own form on form." Exploring the material properties of lead, Serra rolled a sheet of the metal to create the pole seen here. He then used this element to prop a lead plate against the wall, producing a sculpture that uses the wall, rather than a pedestal, as its support.
Visual Description
A large, flat square lead plate about six feet tall and wide—the height of a tall adult and as wide as their outstretched arms—is set flush against the gallery wall and supported by a long cylindrical lead pole that angles down to the floor at a steep diagonal.
The plate is a dark, matte gray and has an uneven, mottled surface with subtle variations in tone. Faint, grid-like seams and small circular marks appear alongside broad smudges and streaks. The plate's bottom edge rests directly on the gallery floor. One end of the cylindrical tube, which is also dark gray, meets the slab above its center; the other end rests on the gallery floor several feet out from the wall. There are no visible fasteners on the plate holding it to the wall surface.