Richard Serra: Props, Films, Early Works

Richard Serra experimented at an early age with industrial materials like rubber, neon, lead, and steel to create powerful sculptures, canvases, films, and drawings that demonstrate an intelligent and exquisitely surreal spatial sensibility.

This volume concentrates on Serra’s early films and his so-called “Prop Pieces,” created between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. In both media, Serra’s main focus is on the artistic action; the positioning, leaning, and adjustment of a lead sheet, and the simple actions recorded on film produce in both cases a strangely gravity-defying sense of both massiveness and fragility, demonstrating power and sensitivity at the same time. One of the most admired sculptors working today, Richard Serra also occupies an important place in the art of the past fifty years, where he is already counted among the classics. This publication juxtaposes the current exhibition with an array of historic photographs from his first shows.

Alexander Klar is an art historian and director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany.