Richard Serra, sculptor of monumental works of art, has died at the age of 85

However, Serra has said that his sculptures—generally sheets of rusty Cor-Ten steel turned into spirals and ovals—his creations were merely a means to an end. “Space is my subject,” he told TV presenter Charlie Rose in 2001. “I use steel to organize space.”

Mr. Serra exploded into the public consciousness after that “oblique arch” A rusted steel screen, 120 feet long and 12 feet high, was installed in the courtyard of a federal building in Manhattan in 1981.

Workers in the building complained that the statue made it difficult to cross the square, and in 1985 about 13,000 people signed a petition calling for its removal. At a public hearing, the work was denounced as “rubbish”, “disturbing”, “calculated crime” and “scrap iron”.

Mr. Serra resisted this, telling broadcaster Mark Miller in 1982 that art was “a scapegoat for the political tension that everyone has in this country.” He has verbally attacked government officials who, in an unrelated case, asked him to place flags atop a statue in the District of Columbia. He added: “I find the idea of ​​what this country consumes in terms of art completely reprehensible.”

In 1989, the General Services Administration removed the Manhattan statue, which has remained in storage ever since. But if Mr. Serra lost the battle, he won the war. His pieces, which have sold for more than $4 million at auction, are in the collections of most of the world's best art museums.

As for the “slash-bow” controversy, Serra told Rose that when he was young he was “aggressive, stubborn, and macho.” He added: “I always wanted to be respected because of my work, not because of my personality.”

“I grew up in fear, in deception.”

Richard Anthony Serra was born in San Francisco on November 2, 1938. His father, a shipyard pipefitter, had immigrated from Spain. His mother was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Odessa.

In 1992, when Mr. Serra exhibited a work titled “The Drowned and the Rescued” At the Stommeln Synagogue in Pulheim, Germany, he wrote in the accompanying catalogue: “When I was five years old I used to say to my mother: Who are we, who are we, where are we from? She answered me one day: If I tell you, you have to promise me never to tell anyone, ever. We are Jews. Jews are burned alive for being Jews.”

“I grew up in fear, deception, embarrassment and denial,” Mr. Serra continued. “I was told not to acknowledge who I am, not to acknowledge who I am.”

As a boy, he began drawing as a way to compete with his older brother, Tony, who was “taller, bigger and stronger.” He explained that the drawing was a way to “appeal to my father's affection.”

But the 3D objects already had him in bondage. He told Rose that his father once took him to a shipyard to watch a ship launch. Serra said that when the huge ship was lowered into the water, he realized that “a heavy object can become light, and this amount of cargo can become rich.”

Mr. Serra worked in steel mills to be able to attend college, first at UC Berkeley, then at UC Santa Barbara, where he studied English literature and earned a bachelor's degree in 1961, Mr. Serra later told the Times. “It was a great experience. I loved the size of it all, the color, the sound of it all.

He continued to paint in his spare time, and one of his literature professors in Santa Barbara suggested that he study art at Yale University. He received a scholarship to attend that university, where he rubbed shoulders with Bryce Marden, Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, and Nancy Graves, all of whom became successful painters.

He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1962 and a Master of Fine Arts degree two years later. After traveling through Europe—including Italy, where he mounted a show of live and stuffed animals as a means of declaring his freedom as an artist—in 1966 he settled in New York. There he was surrounded by like-minded artists. Jasper Johns, the abstract expressionist painter, commissioned one of Mr. Serra's first pieces.

One day, Mr. Serra learned of a cache of several hundred tons of surplus rubber, so he moved the material upstairs in his house and began making sculptures out of it. He wrote down a list of verbs – “roll, lift, hang, roll, support” and many others – and tried to perform each action with rubber. “This is not art,” he recalls Graves, whom he married in 1965, telling him.

“I think we broke up within a year,” he told Rose.

Mr. Serra continued to make sculptures from unconventional materials. He threw molten lead onto the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan and filled the Pasadena Museum of Art with redwood trees. When he returned to his studio, he created a series of “prop” pieces in which sheets of lead or steel are mounted or balanced so that they appear weightless.

Freed from the plinth or wall, he began creating pieces that were meant to be experienced as well as seen. Mr. Serra explained that they formed “volumes of space” that people could walk through, through and around.

In 1966, he was hired by Manhattan gallery owner Leo Castelli. Mr. Castelli, who gave Mr. Serra a monthly stipend, said, “‘Richard, make me a little piece that I can sell,’ and I used to say, ‘Leo, pay it,’” Mr. Serra recalled.

In fact, his pieces got bigger and bigger. His “Torqued Ellipse” series consists of massive steel sheets curved into curved “rooms” open to the sky. He said he was partly inspired by the dome of the 17th-century church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome.

In 1999, art critic Jerry Saltz, writing for the Village Voice, was intrigued by the idea “converts,” The sculpture, made up of six 50-foot-tall curved steel panels, was installed (with great difficulty) at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. Noting that the Switch weighs 324,000 pounds, he wrote that it “resembles an interior cathedral, a force of nature, a fortress or an act of hubris.”

In 2005, “A matter of time” Composed of eight massive steel pieces, they are now permanently installed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, helping to solve an architectural problem: One of the rooms in the museum, designed by Frank Gehry, was too large to fit almost any works except those of Mr. Gehry. Walk.

Although they collaborated on this and other projects, Mr. Serra said architects like Gehry were celebrated for doing things he did best.

“Architects use the most advanced art of the time to achieve their own goals,” he told Rose. “Most of what you see in architecture are watered-down ideas of sculptors.” He said he was never interested in becoming an architect because he did not care about practicalities such as plumbing. Art, he said, was “deliberately useless.”

But if his art was useless, it nonetheless had real-world consequences. In 1971, a 34-year-old worker was crushed to death by a 2-ton steel plate, part of a Serra sculpture installed outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

“After the accident, the reaction against me personally was incredibly harsh,” Serra told French magazine Artistes in 1980. I was harassed, ridiculed, and shamed, and friends, other artists, museum directors, critics, and dealers told me to stop working. It did two things: It put me into analysis for seven years and sent me on the road: I worked in Japan, Canada, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, anywhere I could find support.

Mr. Serra also worked as a film director. His 1968 short film “Hand Catching Lead” shows exactly what its title promises. He produced countless works on paper, always monochromatic images of geometric shapes. At the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Mr. Serra showed a crayon drawing of an Abu Ghraib prisoner with the words “Stop Bush.”

In 1981, Mr. Serra married the German-born art historian Clara Firegraaf. In addition to Wiergraf, survivors include two brothers, sculptor Rudolph Serra and Tony Serra, a famous civil rights lawyer who took a vow of poverty.

In his conversation with Rose, Richard Serra summed up the impact of his work. If you can challenge “people's preconceptions about what containment in space is, what release in space is, what passage through space is, then I think that's something worth doing,” he said.