2. Artists & stock
3. Richard Serra
4. Biography

Notes of biography

The sculptor Richard Serra is born in 1939 in San Francisco. He studies primarily English literature at UC Berkeley and Santa Barbara, working alongside in a steel mill to earn a living. He studies, subsequently, Fine Arts and painting at Yale University, where he collaborates in the work of Josef Albers "Interaction of Color".
In 1965, thanks to a scholarship, he lives in Paris, where he meets Philip Glass and becomes interest in the work of Brancusi ("It was there that my switching to sculpture took place," says the artist), then Greece and Turkey. Again scholar, Richard Serra spends a year in Florence (Italy) where he discovers the Povera Arte, which influences his work.
The young artist moves to New York the following year, frequenting many artists of his generation who become salient: Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Joan Jonas, Bruce Naumann and others. By the mid-sixties, Richard Serra regularly participates in group exhibitions, including those on American sculpture, and the first in a long list of solo exhibitions present his work in Rome in 1966. This is the beginning of a very large number of exhibitions throughout the world. The artist travels extensively to install his sculptures (USA, Spain, Israel, Japan, Greece, France, Germany, etc.). Over time, most major international museums organize events around his work. Numerous awards and honors mark his artistic career. Richard Serra receives significant public commissions (Amsterdam, New York, Paris - Square de Choisy - Berlin, Reykjavik, Basel, etc.).
From his beginnings as a sculptor, Richard Serra gives up all traditional data from sculpture; his work evolves around a slow thinking, toward minimal forms that are his trademark.
His works are staged to reveal tensions, an imbalance or potential energy. The use of the gravity of the material is a constant in the activity of Richard Serra, more particularly in the balance of steel sheets resting on the edges, either against a wall or against each other in support by their top or in other combinations. The artist exploits the latent possibilities of collapse and the resulting dangers emanating from them.
Serra's sculptures are inseparable from the place for which they are created. Richard Serra is an artist with multiple concerns, a man of excess. The artist builds a large engraved work, begun in the early 70s, using various means of graphic expression: engravings, lithographs and serigraphs.
He lives and works in New York and New Scotland.
Richard Serra died in March 2024 in Orient (see the tribute page), New York, at the age of 85.

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