Serra, 67, a San Francisco painter who graduated from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture in 1964, came to sculpture only after a two-year stay in Europe, where he saw works by Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. Early on, he experimented with discarded industrial materials like vulcanized rubber, neon and lead (in works on view in MoMA’s sixth-floor galleries); “Belts,” for instance, is a series of different-colored rubber straps hanging on a wall. Serra says the piece was inspired by Jackson Pollock in its “noncompositional all-overness.”
Working from a list of verbs like “to roll,” “to fold,” “to bend,” “to twist,” Serra charted his path. He explored different, nontraditional materials to figure out how they worked. There was no preconceived image; what drove him was the interaction between material and process, and of both with the site. For instance, he lifted a single 12-foot sheet of rubber from the center to see what would happen. It resulted in the tentlike piece “To Lift.” This led to the four one-ton works in the 1969 series “Prop Pieces,” each consisting of four sheets of lead leaning precariously against one another without being welded or nailed down. Poised miraculously in a square gallery, “Prop Pieces”—one is called “House of Cards,” which it resembles in shape and seeming lightness—look as if they could collapse. But they don’t. In fact, they were followed by larger pieces like “Circuit II,” in which four huge steel sheets, placed in four corners and held up by them, divide a room.
The 1990s saw Serra creating monumental stand-alone works—on view in MoMA’s garden—like “Torqued Ellipse IV” and “Intersection II,” forged in weatherproof steel in a German factory, that invite the viewer to walk around and through them. “Intersection II” consists of four identical conical sections—two tilt inward and two outward—creating three distinct spaces in one work. “I consider space to be a material,” Serra says. “I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct.”
Among the most compelling works in this show, however, are the most re-cent: “Sequence,” “Band” and “Torqued Torus Inversion,” all made in 2006 and displayed on MoMA’s customized second floor. Made of undulating sheets of rust-colored steel, they create ever-changing spaces and become Rorschach tests, inspiring a different response in each individual. “Band,” for example, looks like a 70-foot-long unfurling ribbon—but its shape is not apparent from inside the exhibit. With no distinct interior or exterior, it creates four separate spaces. “Nothing repeats,” Serra says. “There is no beginning, no end to the band.” As with all his works, they give viewers a fresh perspective on the meaning and uses of space.
