Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective
Richard Serra, Pacific Judson Murphy, 1978
Left: 112 x 174 inches; right 112 x 107 inches Paintstick on Belgian linen© Richard Serra Photo: Eric Pollitzer
March 1, 2012
– June 17, 2012
The first-ever retrospective of the artist’s drawings, Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, will be the first major one-person exhibition organized by the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center.
Though his sculptures have been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, Richard Serra’s drawings – crucial to his work for more than forty years – have never received a critical overview. This exhibition of works, drawn from major European and American public and private collections, will trace Serra’s investigation of drawing as an activity both independent of and linked to his sculptural practice. Organized chronologically, it will address significant shifts in concept, materials, and scale, and will culminate with new, never-before-exhibited large-scale works.
In the early 1970s Serra drew on paper primarily with ink, charcoal, and lithographic crayon, using such sketches to explore form and perceptual relations between an envisioned sculpture and the viewer. Over the years they evolved into autonomous works of art, bold forms created with black paintstick that exploded beyond the boundaries of the paper support.
In the mid 1970s, Serra made the first of his monumentally scaled Installation Drawings, bringing radical scale and technique to an architectural context. Working on site, he attached Belgian linen directly to the wall and with vigorous and repetitive gestures applied paintstick that had been melted down and recast in large, heavy blocks.
Over the last twenty-five years Serra has continued to invent new drawing techniques. In the late 1980s he explored how to further articulate the tension of weight and gravity by placing pairs of overlapping sheets of paper saturated with paintstick in horizontal and vertical compositions. In his most recent work he has embarked on numerous series with a remarkable variety of surface effects. Serra is among a significant group of artists whose transformative work irrevocably changed the practice and definition of modernist drawing, and challenged drawing’s role in the traditional hierarchy of media.
Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, is organized by curators Bernice Rose, Michelle White and Gary Garrels and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring several original, scholarly texts.
The exhibition will travel to The Metropolitan Museum of Art Spring 2011, followed by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art October 15, 2011- January 17, 2012.
This exhibition is generously supported by Janie C. Lee and David B. Warren, the Four Seasons Hotel Houston, and the City of Houston.