Richard Serra, Sculptor of Monumental Steel Works, Dead at 85

Richard Serra. Photo: Charles Eshelman/FilmMagic

Richard Serra, the sculptor known for his geometric, large-scale steel works, died on Tuesday at his home in Orient, New York. He was 85. The artist was battling pneumonia, the artist’s lawyer, John Silberman, confirmed to the New York Times. One of the most celebrated figures of the minimalist generation, Serra made site-specific, monumental structures that evoke rusted industrial metals, jutting out of the ground and seemingly abandoned, or archeological sites that swallow and beguile onlookers. To experience the entirety of some of his objects, viewers have to dawdle around and through them, crane their necks, or move farther away, forcing anyone who cares to actively confront the rusty-looking husks.

Born in San Francisco in 1938, the artist earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at UC Santa Barbara before completing a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in painting at Yale. His art-world star rose in 1968, when he began showing his process-driven works at Leo Castelli gallery. That same year, he exhibited his Splashing installation, which consisted of molten lead hurled onto the gallery’s brick wall and concrete floor.

Serra continued to disrupt space with his celebrated, and sometimes controversial, steel behemoths. Tilted Arc, erected in 1981, aggravated office workers in lower Manhattan, who found the slightly curved steel artwork to be an ugly and dangerous object. Local officials removed the 12-foot-tall, 120-foot-long freestanding sculpture in 1989 after intense hatred led to a legal battle over the role of public art. Together with geometric works on paper, Serra continued to experiment with austere steel pieces, sometimes simple smatterings of geometric shapes or sheets of metal, such as Schunnemunk Fork, unearthed like a lost holy site, other times sinuous and labyrinth, like his Torqued Ellipse tombs and The Matter of Time.