Richard Serra is widely known for architecturally scaled steel sculptures, labyrinthine structures often large enough to walk within. This month SFMOMA presents Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, an exhibition of rarely seen, comparably vast drawings that further illuminate the artist’s thought process. Consider this a primer to the necessary viewing experience — reproductions afford little in terms of detail, as such the work “fundamentally requires direct engagement” to paraphrase Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture.
Movement is a necessary act in the production and reception of the work. A small drawing, Verb List (1967-1968), notes dozens of active verbs at the beginning of the exhibition: “to roll, to crease, to fold,” and so on. In the first gallery four short videos are interspersed in the display of domestically scaled sculptures — these works explore the creative potential within repetitive action. In Hand Catching Lead (1968), the artist repeatedly tries to grasp a block of lead as it falls through the air. The focus is on the artist’s hand. Everything else, it would appear, is secondary.
Richard Serra, Abstract Slavery, 1974; collection of Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands; c. 2011 Richard Serra / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: Robert Mates and Paul Katz
Often more than 10 feet tall, the drawings embody a physical presence on par with the sculptures, often singularly commanding the galleries. Black oil-based paintstick saturates the picture plane with circular and rectilinear forms — the shapes are anchored in space, unlimited by gravity. Iron strength is conveyed in their position and they hover more muscularly than float on the paper. You smell the paintstick as much as see it, perhaps more so when the galleries are crowded with people, and this offers an unexpected sensory experience of the work. The black surfaces of the drawings are dense with skidded texture, making evident the physical effort required to produce the drawings. Unexpectedly, these surfaces are similar to the weathered tactility of the sculptures, like the physical characteristics of shared DNA.
Serra’s sculptures are often considered drawings in space. Whereas the sculptures appear to challenge gravity through the choice of materials, often steel or lead, the drawings on paper rely on perception. A timeline in the exhibition catalogue details an experience from Serra’s childhood that shaped his work indelibly. As a four-year-old, he watched a tanker in a shipyard as it was rolled off of its cradle and the buoyancy of the vessel was a revelation: “All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory, which has become a recurring dream.”
