W ell known for his large-scale, abstract, sheet.mes tal sculptures, Richard Serra is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Serra conveys the phenomenology of process, weight, and gravity through his towering sculptures, yet a similar approach to materiality and monumentality—while of course on a different scale—is manifest within his two dimensional works as well. Executed in 2007, Untitled holds a staggering amount of depth and texture. The inky, saturated passage echoes that of his arcing steel sculptures, seeming to rest on the precipice of balance and imbalance.
“Few artists have pushed drawing to such sculptural and even architectural extremes as Richard Serra. He has magnified the medium with immense black shapes that sit directly on the wall, their absorptive darkness forcing the space around them to expand or contract. Using black oil paintstick, he has exaggerated drawing’s physical surface, creating expanses of texture that have the rough tactility of bark, or massing dark, roiled spheres as thick as mud pies.”
Drawing and sculpture are inextricably linked in Serra’s oeuvre, for “Serra himself has long said that his sculpture deploys—even that it is—drawing, by which he means that is represents the functional application of drawing as an operation” (Jeffrey Weiss, “Richard Serra,” Artforum, September 2011). While many sculptors practice drawing as a means of making studies that will be converted to the three dimensional, Serra instead creates works on paper that exist for their own sake. His drawings, rather than being subservient to his sculpture, advance similar ideas through a different.mes dium. His drawings are imbued with vitality and dynamism, an ehe paintstick rushing across the paper, leaving scattered black paint drips in its wake. A commanding form, Untitled seems to generate its own gravitational pull and construct its own physical space.
The act of creating these works on paper is a deeply physical endeavor for Serra--he spreads handmade paper on top of a heated block of paintstick. Using the weight of a steel block and oftent.mes s his own body as well, the painstick then saturates the paper. In ruminating upon this process, art historian Neil Cox has said it “depends on achieving even pressure across the surface, sensing the marking, through the movement of the hand, through embodied memory and visual trackings over the blank white sheet…Once the amism to the finished drawings, ultimately generating illusive depth, texture, and tactility that is singular to Serra’s oeuvre.
