Richard Serra is one of the most significant artists of his generation. He has produced large-scale, site-specific sculptures for architectural, urban, and landscape settings spanning the globe. Serra’s first solo gallery exhibitions were held at Galleria La Salita, Rome, in 1966, and at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York, in 1969. His first solo museum exhibition was presented at the Pasadena Art Museum, California, in 1970.
Richard Serra was born in 1938 in San Francisco, California. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Santa Barbara; and Yale University. Serra’s bodies of work in sculpture and drawing have been celebrated with retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art twenty years apart: “Richard Serra/Sculpture,” in 1986 and “Richard Serra Sculpture Forty Years,” in 2007. Other major recent exhibitions include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (1999); American Academy in Rome, Italy (2000); Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2003, 2014); Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Italy (2004); “Richard Serra Drawings—Work Comes Out of Work,” Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008); “Promenade,” Monumenta, Grand Palais, Paris (2008); “Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011, traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; and The Menil Collection, Houston, through 2012); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Netherlands (2014); “Prints,” Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2017); “Props, Films, Early Works,” Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (2017); “Films and Videotapes,” Kunstmuseum Basel (2017); and “Drawings 2015–2017,” Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2017). In 2005, The Matter of Time (1994–2005), a series of eight monumental sculptures, was installed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. East-West/West-East (2014) was permanently installed in the desert of the Brouq Nature Reserve in western Qatar in 2014.