Richard Serra

Feature Artist: Richard Serra

By Sophie Wallace 

“What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.” –Richard Serra

Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipses, Dia:Beacon. Photo by Sophie Wallace.

David Zwirner New York is currently exhibiting a new major installation in forged weatherproof steel by Richard Serra. Entitled Equal, the installation comprises a series of paired stacked cubes. Weighing at forty-tonnes each, the gallery was required to engage hydraulic gantries, bridge rollers and cranes to install them. David Zwirner, who was concerned about the weight of the steel cracking the gallery’s cement floor, had a sculptural on-ramp installed for the duration of the show, which acts as a bridge to lift the weight of the sculptures from the foundations.

Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London. Photo by Grady O’Connor.

Serra, who has been working with sculpture for more than thirty years, was prompted to consider “ways of relating movement to material and space” after watching contemporary dancers as a young artist in New York in the late 1960s. His series, Torqued Ellipses, on long-term view at Dia:Beacon, continues the artist’s exploration of movement and space through sculpture. Weighing at over twenty-tonnes each, the two-inch thick rolled steel plates spiral inwards, so that the viewer is taken on a journey towards the centre of each piece, confronted with a dramatic tension between one’s bodily awareness and one’s vision. Comprised of sixteen-foot sheets of steel—the maximum size available—there were only two rollers in existence that could execute the task of producing the sculptures.

Installation view, Richard Serra: Equal, David Zwirner, New York, 2015. Photo by Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART. Artwork © 2015 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

New Zealand is fortunate to have been graced with Richard Serra’s presence by virtue of his Te Tuhirangi Contour installation at Gibbs Farm. The large-scale site-specific sculpture contains 56 Corten steel plates that follow a single contour line across the landscape.

Richard Serra, Te Tuhirangi Contour, courtesy of Gibbs Farm, New Zealand.

Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938. Serra’s first solo exhibition was held at the Galleria La Salita, Rome in 1966. His first solo museum exhibition was held at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1970. Since then, Serra’s work has been the subject of multiple solo exhibitions across the world. In 2005, the Guggenheim Museum Bibao permanently installed eight large-scale works by Serra and in 2007, the Museum of Modern Art, New York presented a major retrospective of his work.

Richard Serra: Equal is on view at 537 West 20^th Street, New York through the 24^th of July.

Thank you to Sophie Wallace, who is based in New York, for providing this article for the Contemporary Benefactors.

 

FEATURE ARTIST: LEO VILLAREAL

In January 2015 New York-based light artist Leo Villareal visited Auckland, courtesy of The Contemporary Benefactors. Villareal’s work combines LED lights and encoded computer programming to create illuminated displays, which were stunningly illustrated in Cylinder II (2012), and featured in Light Show at the Auckland Art Gallery.

Leo Villareal’s Cylinder 11 2012

Leo Villareal conducted a series of public and private talks and events during his time in New Zealand. During his talk at the Auckland Art Gallery, Villareal describes the progression of his work from creating artwork out of found objects to working with light, sound and video. He describes his pieces as “being liveable and random, with a sense of mystery to them”.

Leo Villarreal presenting at the Auckland Art Gallery

Leo Villareal at the Contemporary Benefactor’s dinner 2015

His most ambitious project to date is The Bay Lights, situated on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. After being asked to use the bridge as a canvas, Villareal, and his team undertook the incredible feat of covering the bridge in 20,000 LED lights. He then spent several months programming and tuning the lights, “like a musical instrument” with a sequence of images reflecting on the water and the environment. As Villareal says, the final result was “like watching a digital campfire where people gather around.  It has created a great sense of community”. The people of San Francisco loved it so much that it will remain a permanent piece of art on the bridge for the foreseeable future.

The Bay Lights, Bay Bridge, San Francisco

Leo Villareal’s full presentation at the Auckland Art Gallery can be viewed through the following link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBosBneaDBo

Leo Villareal was also interviewed by Radio New Zealand.

http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ngts/ngts-20150212-1915-the_importance_of_public_art-048.mp3

A movie about the creation of ‘The Bay Lights’ has been made into a film Impossible Light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPGNVwHuaU8

MORE ABOUT LEO VILLAREAL:

Born in 1967 in Albuquerque, NM, Villareal began experimenting with light, sound, and video while studying set design and sculpture at Yale University, where he received a received a BA in sculpture in 1990. He earned his MPS in the design of new media, computational media, and embedded computing from New York University’s pioneering Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts. He also learned the programming skills that enable him to push LED technology far past familiar commercial applications. Recent exhibitions include, a survey show organized by the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, which continues to tour several museums in the United States.

He has completed many site specific works including, Radiant Pathways, Rice University in Houston, Texas; Mulitverse, The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Diagonal Grid, Borusan Center for Culture and Arts, Istanbul, Turkey; Stars, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York, and the recently installed Hive, for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the Bleecker Street subway station in Manhattan.   Villareal is a focal point of the James Corner Field Operations design team that will renew Chicago’s Navy Pier, and commissioned installations at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and The Durst Organization in New York City, will be in visible public spaces.  Villareal’s work is in the permanent collections of many museums including the  Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY;  Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan;  Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Multiverse 2010
National Gallery of Art
Washington,DC

Bucky Ball 2012
Madison Square Park
NY, New York

Throughout the last four decades a growing number of artists have explored the use of light to frame and create spaces in the built environment. These include Dan Flavin’s space-defining fluorescent light sculptures, James Turrell’s color-saturated voids, Jenny Holzer’s LED-generated texts, and Felix Gonzales-Torres’ strings of lightbulbs. While Villareal’s art acknowledges these forebears, his concepts relate most closely to the instructional wall drawings of Sol LeWitt and the systems-based paintings of Peter Halley.