Though organized by a commercial gallery, this museum-quality show is the third in an important series of recent Richard Serra exhibitions that have greatly deepened our understanding of this artist’s work and achievement. The first, MOMA’s 2007 retrospective, offered a broad overview of his career as a sculptor. Three years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Richard Serra: A Drawing Retrospective” explored the artist’s career as what can only be described as a “graphic sculptor.” Hard up on that comes this show, which zeroes in on Serra’s formative years in the late 1960s, which began with the rough-edged (literally and figuratively) “process pieces” and ended with the “Prop” pieces. As such, it recreates the period that saw Serra emerge as a fully mature artist, the moment when he turned “sculpture” from a noun into a verb.
The show consists of twenty-four sculptures, the earliest from 1966 and the latest dated 1969–71; Serra’s famous 1967 “Verb List,” a kind of artistic manifesto; and five films from the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best known of which is perhaps Hand Catching Lead.
Richard Serra, Slow Roll: For Philip Glass, 1968; Lead, Three rolls, each: 6 x 72 inches; Osaka City Museum, Japan; Photo by Peter Moore © 2013 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS),