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John Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Richard Serra: Works on Paper, an
exhibition of works on paper, oil stick drawings, gravures, and etchings, all of which
were published by the sculptor and printmaker’s preferred print workshop, Los Angelesbased
Gemini G.E.L. The exhibition will occupy the second floor of gallery space, and
coincides with Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, on view at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art October 15 – January 16, 2012.
Richard Serra says about his drawing “Drawing gives me an immediate return for my
effort and the result is commensurate with my involvement. It is an activity that requires
solitude, it is the most concentrated space in which I work.” 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. Serra has also reinvigorated the traditional etching medium, using deeply bitten
plates to create expressive gestural forms. Richard Serra's Gemini work has progressed
from relatively planar images in his early expressive lithographs to prints with a deeper
and more articulated relief found through explorations in increasingly sophisticated
screenprint and intaglio techniques. Thick, black ink is evenly applied to deeply etched
copper plates to create the highly textured and minimalist prints. These prints, on a grand
scale, are evidence of this Serra’s continued ability to convey on paper the weight and
monumentality of his sculpture.
Born in 1939, Richard Serra is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Serra
was born in San Francisco and he went on to study English literature at the University of
California, Berkeley and later at the University of California, Santa Barbara between
1957 and 1961. He helped support himself by working in steel mills, which was to have a
strong influence on his later work. He also names the San Francisco shipyard where his
father worked as a pipe-fitter as another important influence. Serra’s sculpture explores
the exchange between artwork, site, and viewer. He has produced unparalleled largescale,
site-specific sculptures for architectural, urban and landscape settings. 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. Colby College
recently acquired 150 works on paper by Serra, making it the second largest collection of
Serra's work outside of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His current drawing
retrospective, organized by the Menil Collection, opened at The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York in April 2011, and after SFMOMA hosts the exhibition, it will travel to
the Menil Collection, Houston in 2012. Serra lives in Tribeca, New York and on Cape
Breton Island in Nova Scotia.
For further information and photographs, please contact the gallery at 415.781.4629 or
info@berggruen.com. The gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:30-5:30, and Saturday,
10:30-5:00
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