Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"I never thought I'd work with steel. I always thought it was the most traditional material you could use, and that if you used steel you had to acknowledge the tradition of sculpture. But at a certain point I realized that I knew more about steel than probably any artist who had worked with it, and why not use it? Artists who had used steel before did not deal with its tectonic potential, its weight, its compression, its mass, its stasis-that wasn't knowledge that was in the art world. It was in the worlds of engineering and technology, but not the art world. I'd put trusses together as a kid and I'd stuck rivets and I'd seen steel being rigged, so I had no fear of ordering a two-and-a-half-inch plate eight by eight feet that weighted six or seven tons." Excerpted from a conversation with Kynaston McShine in Richard Serra: Sculpture: Forty Years, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939 and received his BFA and MFA at Yale University. He has exhibited extensively in major museums and exhibitions throughout the world, and has created site-specific sculptures for both public and private venues in North America and Europe. His most recent projects include an exhibition at the Museo Archeologico and Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples (2004), and an eight-part permanent installation "The Matter of Time" at the Guggenheim Bilbao, which was inaugurated in 2005. Recent surveys include "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years" at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007); and the drawing retrospective "Work comes out of work" at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008).
Published by Steidl. Edited with text by Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe.
Richard Serra (born 1938) began making prints as early as 1972. For the past five decades he has consistently pursued the myriad possibilities of printmaking and created a graphic oeuvre as concentrated as it is rich and diverse. Even if the relationship between Serra’s prints and his sculptural works cannot be denied—the exploration of form, establishing and testing the tension between positive and negative space, the dialogue between two- and three-dimensionality—the prints are an autonomous form of expression with their own themes and creative approaches, such as his innovative use of oil-stick ink to create a surface that both absorbs and reflects light. This catalogue raisonné offers a complete survey of 50 years of Serra’s graphic work—including lithographs, screen prints and etchings—and situates it in the broader context of his artistic practice.
Throughout his career, the renowned American sculptor Richard Serra has kept a large number of notebooks and sketchbooks which by now fill an entire library in his studio. Contained within them are delicate sketches of his travels, of landscapes, architecture and ideas, some of which the artist has developed into sculptures and drawings. Serra has personally selected three of his sketchbooks, two of which were made in Iceland in 1989, plus a very recent one from Qatar, reproduced here in facsimile.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938. Since the 1960s he has exhibited extensively throughout the world. Serra has created a number of site-specific sculptures in public and private venues in both North America and Europe. His books include Sculpture 1985-1998 (1999), The Matter of Time (2005), Te Tuhirangi Contour (2005) and Notebooks (2011). He lives in New York and Nova Scotia.
Published by Steidl/Gagosian Gallery. Text by Albert Camus, Neil Cox, Francesco Stocchi, Michelle White.
The exhibition encompasses more than 70 works from five different series, Rambles, Composites, Rifts, Rotterdam Horizontals and Rotterdam Verticals, many of which have never been seen before publicly, as well as a selection of his notebooks and films. Examining the ways properties inherent to sculpture are brought onto paper, the drawings are epistemological adjuncts to Serra’s lifelong sculptural explorations.
Designed by McCall Associates in close collaboration with the artist, Drawings 2015–2017 features new scholarship by art historian Neil Cox and exhibition curator Francesco Stocchi, a chronology of the drawings by curator Michelle White, as well as a historical text by Albert Camus selected by Serra. This book introduces readers to Serra’s most recent series and reaffirms his innovation and contribution to the practice of drawing.
Published by Steidl. Edited with text by Alfred Pacquement.
This publication accompanies Richard Serra's (born 1938) pair of exhibitions in Qatar in 2014, at the QMA Gallery at Katara and the Alriwaq Doha exhibition space, as well as his permanent installations 7 and East-West/West-East, both commissioned by the Qatar Museums Authority. Instead of retracing Serra's career chronologically, as is usual in the artist's exhibition catalogues, this book comprises eight thematic chapters that do not aim to investigate all of his work. Rather, this organization facilitates a closer examination of the development of specific bodies of work and thereby a fresh understanding of Serra's overall oeuvre. Each chapter is built around the works shown at the QMA Gallery and Alriwaq Doha, as well as 7, installed in MIA Park in Doha in 2011, and East-West/West-East, installed in 2014 at a site chosen by the artist in the Brouq Nature Reserve near Zekreet.
Richard Serra's reputation as one of the great sculptors of our time is well established, yet the role of sketches in his working practice is not known. This suite of books will change that. Serra keeps a large library of notebooks from throughout his career in his studio, hundreds in total. Contained within them are delicate sketches of his travels, of landscapes, architecture and of other ideas, some of which the artist developed into mature sculptures and drawings. Serra has personally selected five of these precious notebooks, which are reproduced here in facsimile.
Published by Kunsthaus Bregenz. Text by Eckhard Schneider, James Lawrence.
With 2007's monumental retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York Richard Serra's work in steel sculpture was affirmed as a decisive contribution to contemporary art. For more than 40 years he has been creating massive structures that guide and coerce the space around them, operating on equal terms with their environments instead of vanishing into them. But alongside these sculptures he has produced a large body of drawings whose specific material qualities and processual execution on flat surfaces suggest a material density and a physical presence comparable to sculpture. Serra sees drawing as one of the few activities in which he can comprehend the sources of his work-it allows him to "grasp the world." The exhibition Drawings-Work Comes Out of Work presents six groups of works from the last 10 years in large-format illustrations and includes tantalizing photographic glimpses of the artist at work in his studio. Art historian James Lawrence contributes an essay on this hitherto under-published aspect of Serra's oeuvre.
PUBLISHER Kunsthaus Bregenz
BOOK FORMAT Hardback, 9.75 x 12 in. / 234 pgs / 80 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/1/2008 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2008 p. 80
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783865604163TRADE List Price: $90.00 CAD $110.00
Published by Richter Verlag. Edited by Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe.
Richard Serra has pursued a keen dialogue with the possibilities of printing since 1972, in the early stages of his work as an artist, and has now amassed a print oeuvre to rival his sculptural achievement. As with the sculptures, what he has sought to elicit from printing's potential is not simply the duplication of imagery on paper, but a furtherance of each technique's intrinsic material character. Whether the technique is etching, lithograph or silkscreen, the aim is to make an insistent physical presence to be encountered by the viewer's entire body--and consequently some of these works reach up to 80 inches square in surface area. Implementing such basic forces as gravity, instability and potential motion, Serra's graphic works assert space, and human activity in space. They may also be occasioned politically, as works referencing Malcolm X, Bill Clinton and, more recently, Abu Ghraib indicate. The printwork gathered in Catalogue of Works ranges from early lithographs related to Serra's "wall props" of the 1970s, which represent his first graphic experiments, to the large and sensual paintstick on screenprints of the 1980s to 1990s works such as the Hreppholar series, through to all works completed at the end of 2007. One of the most respected sculptors of the twentieth century, Richard Serra, born in 1939 in San Francisco, is famed internationally for his site-specific sculptural environments. While best known for these works, he has explored similar concerns with process, the body and mass in film, drawing and printmaking. Serra lives and works in both New York City and Nova Scotia
Published by Steidl. Artwork by Richard Serra. Photographs by Dirk Reinartz.
Located on the Kaipara harbor in New Zealand, 30 miles north of Auckland, Te Tuhirangi Contour is one of Richard Serra's latest site-specific works. The site is a vast open grass pasture with rolling elevations and curvilinear contours. The sculpture, made of hundreds of tons of steel, is located on one continuous contour, at a length of 843 feet. The particular contour was chosen for its location, differentiation, contraction and expansion in relation to the total volume of the landscape, and the elevation of the sculpture is perpendicular to the fall of the land, which generates its lean of 11 degrees. The work was first mocked-up full scale in wood to determine height and length. Serra's monumental sculpture is documented here in Dirk Reinartz's elegant black-and-white photography.
Published by Gagosian Gallery. Artwork by Richard Serra.
"Line drawings more so than others call up the history of the convention in that they contain a reservoir of memories. One sees drawings through the drawings one has seen. They bind the past with the present. The figure/ground relationship is both the definition and limitation of the convention but it is this limitation that makes the medium compelling to me, though it seems to be in the nature of line drawing no matter how abstract to drift toward the figural." --Richard Serra
PUBLISHER Gagosian Gallery
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 8.25 x 10.75 in. / 74 pgs / 45 color
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/2/2003 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2003
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781880154809TRADE List Price: $40.00 CAD $50.00
Published by Richter Verlag. Artwork by Richard Serra, Josef Albers. Contributions by Kurt Flasch, Stefan Germer, Reinhard Hoeps.
Precarious Balance examines the physicality of contemporary sculpture through the eyes of its greatest masters such as Richard Serra, Josef Albers, Alberto Giacometti and Arnulf Rainer.
Published by Dia Art Foundation. Artwork by Richard Serra. Text by Lynne Cooke, Michael Govan, Mark Taylor.
Torqued Ellipses is a new series of sculptures by Serra which mark a departure in the artist's work. Never before have these spaces been articulated in sculpture or even in architecture.
Published by Richter Verlag. Artwork by Richard Serra. Photographs by Dirk Reinartz.
This book documents the creation of Richard Serra's sculpture "La Mormaire," from the first steps at the steel foundry to final installation in the park of the chateau La Mormaire near Paris.
Published by Richter Verlag. Artwork by Richard Serra.
This is the first publication to describe in detail the troubled history of Richard Serra's large public sculpture, Intersection, which now stands in the Theaterplatz in Basel.