Richard Serra was a contemporary Minimalist artist known for his monumental steel sculptures. Often daunting in scale, Serra’s swooping architectural curves often provoke dizziness and disorientation as viewers walk through their winding passages. Though he also made paintings and prints, it was Serra’s exploration of the properties of unconventional materials—such as Splash (1968–1970), a series using molten lead, and Belts (1966–1967), sculptures of vulcanized rubber—that gradually increased the scale of his work. Like Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, Serra’s attention to materiality was the hallmark of his practice. “It was the first time I looked at sculpture seriously,” Serra said of visiting...