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 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.
