GENEVA.-Gagosian Gallery
presents an exhibition of recent drawings by Richard Serra, executed
between 2007 and 2010. Throughout his career, Serra has made drawings as
separate, immediate, and fundamental lines of investigation to his
sculptures. They are explorations in their own right, integral to the
overall concerns of his sculptural practice, and unique intuitive
explorations within their own established criteria. Using black
paintstick or oilstick, heated to a viscous and sometimes fluid state,
he creates elemental forms through direction action on the paper and the
accretion of medium. These drawings are self-referential: they do not
imply surface and weight but rather they are surface and weight. Dreiser
(2009) and Artaud (2010) are from the Greenpoint Rounds series. In
these works which each measure almost two meters square, a large black
circle is embedded in the surface of the the heavy paper. Serra uses paint-stick, heating it to a viscous and
sometimes fluid state. He slowly builds up the dense and irregular form
so that each drawing has its own unique surface that appears as a
palpable structure rather than a mere surface. Each drawing exerts a
vastly different energy and exudes a singular character. Other works in
the exhibition, such as Stratum 12 and Tracks #47, feature black arcs to
the right or left of the paper. As the dense pigment in these works
absorbs and dissipates light, the sheer mass and volume of the drawing
emerges from the surface as a declarative presence of thick contracting
and retaining accumulations.
Richard Serra produces unparalleled large-scale sculptures, many of
which are in major museums and private collections around the world.
Recent projects include the eight-part permanent installation The Matter
of Time at the Guggenheim Bilbao (2005) and a survey exhibition at The
Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007), twenty years after his first
survey there in 1986. In 2008 he installed Promenade, a course of five
massive vertical steel elements, each towering more than fifty feet, at
the Grand Palais in Paris for the MONUMENTA exhibition. In the same
year, a survey of his drawings from 1989-2008 entitled "Richard Serra:
Drawings--Work Comes Out of Work" was exhibited at the Kunsthaus
Bregenz, Austria. A drawing retrospective organized by the Menil
Collection will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York on
April 13. The exhibition will travel to the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, where it will open in October 2011, as well as the Menil
Collection, Houston in 2012.
Serra lives and works in New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada. De: http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=46242
