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Lot Essay
One of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, Richard Serra’s Untitled, from his powerful works on paper series, is an excellent example of how the artist richly and expertly handles space and medium in the two-dimensional form. Like the artist’s famed metal sculptures, in which towering rings and sinuous curves enchant and bewitch the viewer, the concentric circles and depth of Untitled invite the viewer to share in a wider experience. The circle, an elemental form built up through repetition to produce a vortex-like form, is riddled with mixed media in the outer edges, casting off paintstick into the surroundings to give the impression of spinning movement. The inner eye, clean and distinctly outlined in thick impasto, anchors the whirling form, sending off a lightness and weightlessness which deftly balances the darker mass.
Serra began working on paper in the 1970s, separating the practice from his sculpture early on. In the artist’s own words: “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” (R. Serra, Richard Serra: Line Drawings, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2002, n.p.). The intimacy of the medium is apparent in how the artist achieves the work, the scale of the work often dictated by the reach of his arm with his oil or paintstick, in some instances the artist himself standing in the center of the paper. Untitled is one from the line drawings series, made between 2000-2002, in which Serra melted paintstick onto hard surface on the floor, then laid the paper down on top of the liquid, sometimes through the use of a screen. Working from the back of the paper, Serra exerted pressure onto the paper so that the liquid seeped through from the front, the artist not seeing the work until he peeled the paper off the floor. Serra’s artistic intuition, in which he worked from his mind’s eye to create the final product, is splendidly captured by this series.
Pressure comes from both the hand of the artist, as well as the density of the medium. The black oil paintstick is heated so that the paper absorbs the color, imbuing it with a mass at the most built-up points. At its lighter points, the oilstick is applied with such a delicate touch that it whispers across the paper, and the dialogue between heavy and light creates internal space within the paper. The sense of spatial perception and the phenomenon of gravity is well articulated by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith: “He has magnified the medium with immense black shapes that sit directly on the wall, their absorptive darkness forcing the space around them to expand or contract. Using black oil paintstick, he has exaggerated drawing’s physical surface, creating expanses of texture that have the rough tactility of bark, or massing dark, roiled spheres as thick as mud pies” (R. Smith, “Sketches from the Man of Steel,” New York Times, April 14, 2011).
Serra began working on paper in the 1970s, separating the practice from his sculpture early on. In the artist’s own words: “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” (R. Serra, Richard Serra: Line Drawings, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2002, n.p.). The intimacy of the medium is apparent in how the artist achieves the work, the scale of the work often dictated by the reach of his arm with his oil or paintstick, in some instances the artist himself standing in the center of the paper. Untitled is one from the line drawings series, made between 2000-2002, in which Serra melted paintstick onto hard surface on the floor, then laid the paper down on top of the liquid, sometimes through the use of a screen. Working from the back of the paper, Serra exerted pressure onto the paper so that the liquid seeped through from the front, the artist not seeing the work until he peeled the paper off the floor. Serra’s artistic intuition, in which he worked from his mind’s eye to create the final product, is splendidly captured by this series.
Pressure comes from both the hand of the artist, as well as the density of the medium. The black oil paintstick is heated so that the paper absorbs the color, imbuing it with a mass at the most built-up points. At its lighter points, the oilstick is applied with such a delicate touch that it whispers across the paper, and the dialogue between heavy and light creates internal space within the paper. The sense of spatial perception and the phenomenon of gravity is well articulated by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith: “He has magnified the medium with immense black shapes that sit directly on the wall, their absorptive darkness forcing the space around them to expand or contract. Using black oil paintstick, he has exaggerated drawing’s physical surface, creating expanses of texture that have the rough tactility of bark, or massing dark, roiled spheres as thick as mud pies” (R. Smith, “Sketches from the Man of Steel,” New York Times, April 14, 2011).