© Gibbs Farm 2013
Serra’s 56 steel plates lean out by 11 degrees from the vertical and trace a single contour line across the land in a way that, in the artist’s words, “collects the volume of the land.” The work is a hallmark of the strong relationships formed between collector and artist.
Serra says of meeting Gibbs, “The first thing he said to me was ‘I’ve just been to Storm King [which has Serra’s Schunnemunk Fork 1990-91] and I want a more significant piece than that. I don’t want any wimpy piece in the landscape.’”
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939 and studied first at the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Barbara; and then graduated from Yale University with both a BFA and an MFA where he received a Yale Travelling Fellowship for a year in Paris, followed by a year in Florence
funded by a Fulbright grant. With a basic syntax of point load, balance, counter-balance, and leverage, Richard Serra is one of the most significant artists of his generation. His groundbreaking sculpture explores the exchange between artwork, site, and viewer. He has produced large-scale,
site-specific sculptures for architectural, urban, and landscape settings spanning the globe, from Iceland to New Zealand. Recent major projects have been presented at MONUMENTA at the Grand Palais in Paris; the Guggenheim Bilbao, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Te Tuhirangi Contour
1999/2001
56 Corten steel plates
252m x 6m x 50mm

Richard Serra

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