15 février 2009
Richard Serra "Equal Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi" @ the Museo Reina Sofia
Richard Serra, Equal Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi, 1986. Laminated Steel. Two blocks 148.5 X 500 X 24 cm. Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia, Madrid
MADRID.- The new sculpture by Richard Serra "Equal Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi" can now be seen at the Museo Reina Sofia, where the old library has been specially prepared to house the work of art, which substitutes the one created in 1986, which disappeared in 2006.
The sculpture has been reinstalled in a new atmosphere of the permanent collection of the Reina Sofia after having formed part of the exhibition "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years", at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York during the summer of 2007.
This second version of the sculpture - the first disappeared in 2006 and has never been found – has been reinstalled due to an agreement reached between the American artist and the museum, for which Serra authorized the museum to replace the missing work and to install it after the MoMA retrospective dedicated to Serra.
According to the museum, after several meetings with Serra a deal was struck where the sculptor would fabricate the slabs of steel that conform the work of art "Equal-Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi. But, since the pieces were going to be replaced, and not a new acquisition, the author did not receive money.
Also in the new deal struck with Richard Serra it was specified that the formal and technical characteristics of the pieces to be replaced would be identical to the original "Equal-Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi", made in 1986.
Richard Serra, Equal Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi, 1986. Laminated Steel. Two blocks 148.5 X 500 X 24 cm. Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia, Madrid
12 novembre 2008
$125,131,500 for Sotheby's New York Evening Sale of Contemporary Art
The top lot of the sale was Yves Klein’s Archisponge (RE 11), which brought $21,362,500. Photo: Sotheby's
NEW YORK, NY.- Tonight at Sotheby’s, the Evening sale of Contemporary Art brought $125,131,500 million (est. $202,400,000/ 280,400,000*). The top lot of the sale was Yves Klein’s Archisponge (RE 11), which brought $21,362,500. Artist records were set tonight for Philip Guston, Beggar’s Joys, which achieved $10,162,500; John Currin, Nice ‘N Easy, which realized $5,458,500; and Richard Serra, 12-4-8, which fetched $1,650,000. The sale was 68.2% sold by lot, with 43 of 63 works offered finding buyers.
Tobias Meyer, Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s and the evening’s auctioneer, said, “Tonight we saw a seasoned, smart collecting community responding to great material at levels that were achievable. The American collecting community bought works of quality with intelligence, for the right price.”
Alex Rotter, Head of the Contemporary Art Department in New York, said, “Tonight, American buyers were the most active, but there was also competitive bidding from Europe. This market has gone up more than 250% in the past two years, and the global financial turmoil obviously has brought a correction. Tonight’s sale, which was put together during the summer in a very different economic environment, brings us back to the levels of the autumn of 2006, when the evening sale also brought $125 million.”
Anthony Grant, International Senior Specialist of Contemporary Art, said, “Tonight we offered great examples from the spectrum of post-war art. After our great success with the spectacular Yves Klein from the Lauffs Collection last May, a Private Collector decided to consign the Klein, and it did not disappoint, selling for over $21 million, not quite reaching the artist record of $23.6 million. We did however set a record for Philip Guston, when Beggar’s Joys brought over $10 million. Guston’s previous record was set in 2005, when The Street sold for $7,296,000. Another important artist record was set for John Currin’s, Nice ‘N Easy, one of the most sought-after lots of the night, which realized $5.5 million. This work was included in the famous Carnegie International 1999/2000 which proved to be a watershed exhibition for the artist.”
Highlighting this evening’s sale was Yves Klein’s Archisponge RE 11 from 1960, the most significant work in the artist’s Relief Eponge series, which sold for $21,362,500. This outstanding price follows closely behind the record set for the artist just last May at Sotheby’s when his gold Monochrome, MG 9, circa 1962, from the Collection of Helga and Walther Lauffs, brought $23,561,000.
A new auction record was achieved this evening for Philip Guston when his rare and important abstract expressionistic painting Beggar’s Joys, from 1954-55, sold for $10,162,500. Beggar’s Joys is a masterpiece from Guston’s first major innovative period in which he moved away from the figurative art of the 1930s toward his unique brand of abstraction in the early 1950s. Most of the artist’s works from this period are in the collections of major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the present work was exhibited extensively, including in several traveling retrospectives of the artist’s work.
Another auction record was established for John Currin tonight when his Nice ‘n Easy from 1999, sold to a client on the phone for $5,458,500 after extended bidding.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Interior with Red Wall (lot 47, est. $8/12 million) brought $7,026,500. In this series, his sources were advertisements of an American scene of a different type – the domestic interior. Presented in a highly stylized manner, the painting focuses on the myth of American domestic bliss, ironically defined by seductive possessions and uniformity.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Interior with Red Wall (lot 47, est. $8/12 million) brought $7,026,500. In this series, his sources were advertisements of an American scene of a different type – the domestic interior. Presented in a highly stylized manner, the painting focuses on the myth of American domestic bliss, ironically defined by seductive possessions and uniformity. Photo: Sotheby's.
12 août 2008
Richard Serra Drawings/Work @ Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria
Richard Serra, Portrait. Photo: Markus Tretter. © Richard Serra/VBK, Wien, 2008, Kunsthaus Bregenz.
BREGENZ.- In an unparalleled exhibition, the Kunsthaus Bregenz will be showing more than 60, mostly large-format drawings by one of the major sculptors and draftsmen of our day. Following exhibitions in Maastricht 1990 (Bonnefantenmuseum) and in London 1992 (Serpentine Gallery), this will be the first comprehensive presentation of Richard Serra’s graphic oeuvre ever shown in Europe.
Selected in conjunction with the artist, the works on display bring together key work series from important private collections and museums in Europe and the USA, as well as new pieces produced by Richard Serra especially for the exhibition in Bregenz. All in all, the exhibition will include six work series, setting the stage for a dialogue spanning nearly twenty years of artistic production. The exhibition is arranged on four levels and comprises the large-format “Diptychs,” 1989, the series “Weight and Measure,” 1994, “Rounds,” 1996/97, and “out-of-rounds,” 1999, and the artist’s most recent works “Solids,” 2007/08, and “Forged Drawing,” 2008.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939. After studying painting with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, where he graduated in 1964/65, Serra continued his training abroad, spending a year each in Florence and Paris. Since then, Richard Serra has lived in New York, where he first used rubber in 1966 and began applying his characteristic work material lead in 1968. Here, also, the principles of supporting and leaning were put to the test, which were later expanded to become the fundamental principle of his sculptural work. During this time he developed his own sculptural grammar, which was based on formal reductionism, an active site-specific reference, and the central theme of gravity and balance. This results in sculptures that let the viewer experience the critical balance of different forces and whose large-scale dimensions impart a strong physical and emotional experience.
Serra’s first solo exhibition in 1969 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York was followed by many large international presentations of his sculptural work, landscape projects, and site-specific installations using his primary material: steel. After his large-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, Richard Serra is currently showing “Promenade,” the monumental sculpture he created for the Grand Palais in Paris.
Since 1971, Serra has focused not only on sculptural works, but also on large-scale drawings using various techniques. These are as important to him as his sculptures, and as the artist himself explains: “I like to draw. It is an activity I rely on, a dependency of sorts. Drawing gives me an immediate return for my effort and the result is commensurate with my involvement. It is an activity that requires solitude, it is the most concentrated space in which I work.”
In another context, he calls drawing the source of his artistic activity, not least because it affords him the freedom to think about the elementary conditions of his sculptural pieces without needing to rework them. Serra has always drawn. He was accepted to the Yale School of Art based on the drawings he submitted. The color he uses in his drawings is black. A dense layer of paintstick absorbs and dissipates light; what emerges is the mass, density, and volume of the drawing. “Black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a larger volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging. […] To use black is the clearest way of marking against a white field.” (Richard Serra) In other words, the artist finds it is also the clearest way of indicating something without triggering associations because black is interpreted as a material substance rather than a color. Unlike the site-specific “Wall Drawings,” which, rendered directly onto cloth, operate with the proportions and scales of the existing architecture, Serra’s drawings on paper are not bound by context. The frame serves, instead, to separate the paper drawing from the wall.
Richard Serra’s drawing material is the paintstick, a wax-like grease crayon. Serra melts several paintsticks to form large pigment blocks. This transformation allows him to apply the black material in broad, dense strokes. Warming or melting the material for his drawings, he applies it either directly onto the paper with large sweeps of his arm, or he uses a window-screen as an intermediary surface through which he presses the color. In his recent “Solids,” Richard Serra goes a step further. “Melted paintstick is poured onto a hard surface on the floor.
Sometimes, not always, a sheet of window-screen is placed on top of the liquid paintstick. Then the paper is laid down, either on top of the screen or directly on top of the liquid paintstick. Pressure is exerted on the back of the paper with a hard marking tool. The front side of the paper picks up the mark. With a few exceptions where the front is marked through a blackened screen, no direct drawing is done on the front of the paper. I don’t see the drawing I am making until the paper is pulled off the floor and turned over or the screen is lifted.”
The material and the entire work process serve to build the drawing step by step. It is an elementary process, which, carried out with intense energy, is the result of direct action. By splitting and discontinuing the flow, Richard Serra avoids the gestural and allows a dense superficial construction. Serra avoids gestural features in order to sharpen the awareness of the viewer and draw attention to one’s own corporeality. He is not concerned with subjective gestures or narrative references; at the core of his drawings is the principle of marking, of the anonymous characteristic style in which the drawing seems to find its form through the density of the material and the compact work process. Precisely because every illusory strategy is avoided, the forms are at the same time able to imply weight, mass, and volume. For, particularly through his training with Josef Albers, Richard Serra is fully aware that the weight of a drawing does not just depend on the layers of paintstick applied, but above all on its form.
For the works of the series “Weight and Measure,” Richard Serra has brought together two large sheets of double-laminated Hiromi paper. He treats each of the two as an active substance rather than a passive ground by positioning the upper sheet so that it only very slightly overlaps with the lower one. Together with the black areas applied as layers of paintstick, these drawings, like the “Diptychs,” are reminiscent in their work process of the balancing of steel slabs with space, weight, equilibrium, size, scale, placing, and density.
The series “Rounds” and “out-of-rounds” result from the application of material in an exhausting process, which, by virtue of the thick layers of paintstick, gives the forms material presence, mass, and weight. In this way, in “out-of-rounds” a curved cardboard shape marks the circumference and defines the paintstick borders during application. Liquid material under pressure shoots out and produces the explosive markings at the edges.
With his “Forged Drawing,” which was created especially for Bregenz, Serra picks up on a work series from the seventies and eighties. It deals with steel masses in each of the four basic shapes that can be forged with a blacksmith’s hammer: circle, rectangle, octagon, and square. “These are the building blocks which most forged products can be traced back to. I thought it would be worth the effort to point out that the circle, rectangle, octagon, and square are the graphic elements from which everything a blacksmith forges derives. I interpreted this literally and re-presented this idea by hanging the steel forms on the wall and covering their surfaces with a paintstick.”
Serra’s programmatic drawing concept of connecting body awareness with material and integrating both visual and tactile perception allows the viewer to experience a densified, intensified space in connection with densified, materialized time. Eckhard Schneider
Richard Serra, Installation view Kunsthaus Bregenz, ground floor. Photo: Markus Tretter © Richard Serra/VBK, Wien, 2008, Kunsthaus Bregenz