Progressive American sculptor Richard Serra has passed away

ANP Productions | Source: ANP

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The American sculptor Richard Serra, famous for his progressive and especially very large constructions, died on Tuesday at the age of 85 at his home in Long Island, east of New York. Various media report this, including The New York Times (NYT).

Serra had wanted to be a painter, but instead became one of the greatest sculptors of his time. He made a splash starting in the 1960s with the “monumental environments” he invented, full of “immense tilting corridors, ellipses and spirals of steel” that gave his works an “abstract grandeur and physical intimacy,” according to the NYT.

Serra’s most famous works combined the scale of ancient temples with the inscrutability of monuments like Stonehenge. However, his work was separate from religion, he said several times. Serra was concerned with distorting spaces, for example through the use of crooked, curved or circular walls. He himself said regarding his work that it required “a lot of walking and looking”.

Bridges and cranes

His often gigantic sculptures were composed of enormous slabs of cold-rolled steel, made in factories that normally made ship hulls. They were sometimes so heavy that they had to be placed in the location desired by Serra using bridges and cranes.

There are also several works by Serra in the Netherlands. In Museum Voorlinden visitors can walk through his steel construction Open Ended (2007-2008) and in Zeewolde he installed two concrete walls of 200 meters in 1996. The artwork is called Sea Level and is a reminder of how high the sea level of the Zuiderzee was before it was drained for the construction of Flevoland.

Several years ago, Serra was diagnosed by his doctors with cancer of the tear duct in his left eye. The remedy was simple, he was told: the eye had to be removed. He refused, because it would endanger his eyesight and therefore his work as an artist. He eventually succumbed to pneumonia.