CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.- The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia welcomed more than 900 students last week, at a premier opening during Final Friday. Lender Jordan D. Schnitzer spoke to students about Serra’s prints and his experiences as a collector. January’s Final Friday shattered the previous attendance record of 651 guests, set in August of 2015.

This exhibition showcases the prints of contemporary icon Richard Serra. Best known for his large-scale public sculpture, Serra consistently maintains a practice in related media including film, drawing, and printmaking. The exhibition features his earliest graphic attempts in lithography from 1972 through more recent works created in 2015.

“So much of the art-going public is familiar with Serra’s sculpture,” states curator Rebecca Schoenthal. “I am looking forward to introducing our visitors to his graphic oeuvre, which is related, but ultimately independent.”

This exhibition includes autonomous prints exploring social and political themes, topics and figures of the moral majority, Jesse Helms, and Irish hunger-striker Bobby Sands. The current U.S. Presidential campaigns, with their focus often on both moral and social issues, make this exhibition even more relevant and engaging.

Many of Serra’s prints are directly related to specific (earlier) sculptural pieces. In several of these works, the images function as sketches of the physical experience of the sculpture in relation to the body. In others, Serra resolves the visual possibilities of the sculpture as the body moves in space. In either case, the two-dimensional black and white images, in their utter simplicity, evoke the complex tectonic attributes of his steel sculptures such as weight, compression, stasis, mass, and tension.

"Richard Serra is the foremost sculptor in the world today. His sculpture takes shapes and forms to another dimension. His works on paper have that same effect. Time, space and form come together and make his works on paper an artistic journey that, once expressed, can never be forgotten,” writes exhibition lender, Mr. Schnitzer.