Richard Serra, Who Recast Sculpture on a Massive Scale, Dies at 85

 

 

 

His tilted walls of rusting steel, monumental blocks and other immense and inscrutable forms created environments that had to be walked through, or around, to be fully experienced.

 

 

"Mr. Serra’s most celebrated works had some of the scale of ancient temples or sacred sites and the inscrutability of landmarks like Stonehenge. But if these massive forms had a mystical effect, it came not from religious belief but from the distortions of space created by their leaning, curving or circling walls and the frankness of their materials.

This was something new in sculpture; a flowing, circling geometry that had to be moved through and around to be fully experienced. Mr. Serra said his work required a lot of “walking and looking,” or “peripatetic perception.” It was, he said, “viewer centered”: Its meanings were to be arrived at by individual exploration and reflection."

READ OBIT BY ROBERTA SMITH