Overview
The art of Richard Serra is internationally admired for its powerful material qualities and its searching exploration of the relationship between the work, the viewer and the site. Indeed, since his emergence in the mid-1960s, Serra is widely understood to have radicalized and extended the very definition of sculpture. Quite simply the most complete view to date of the work of one of the most important artists of the last half-century, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years offers a detailed visual presentation and documentation of Serra's entire career, from his early experiments with materials like rubber, neon and lead to the environmentally scaled steel works of recent years--including three monumental new sculptures created for The Museum of Modern Art's 2007 retrospective, for which this volume was produced. The book contains major scholarly essays on the artist's work by Benjamin Buchloh, Lynne Cooke and John Rajchman, as well as an interview with the artist by Kynaston McShine, the Museum's Chief Curator at Large.Editorials
Library Journal
This catalog of a retrospective exhibition at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a first-rate visual and intellectual survey of Richard Serra's (b. 1939) extensive sculptural career. Chief curator McShine provides a thoughtful and illuminating interview with the artist, and essays by critics Cooke, Benjamin Buchloh, and John Rajchman cover the artist's early work, his ideas about abstraction, and the potent relationships his work has to landscape. The 450 black-and-white illustrations are exceptional, giving some indication of the scale and mass of the works; some color illustrations, however-particularly for the works in landscape environments-would have been valuable. Despite MoMA's early recognition and championing of Serra, this catalog rises above any "official" endorsement to address his art directly. The most thoughtful and visually comprehensive book on the artist-and not quite as heavy as one of his sculptures! Highly recommended for all American art collections.
—Jack Perry Brown