Richard Serra has died. The 85-year-old sculptor who made architecture more or less a permanent condition of his art was known for inventing a process for bending corten steel to create works he explained were about eliciting sensation and intended to display the unseen physical forces of nature.

More than any other contemporary artist (Sarah Sze, Robert Irwin, Richard Estes, etc.) whose work is informed by or makes as its subject architecture, Serra’s use of steel as a means of organizing space and sequencing experience within it is, arguably, the greatest primer for any learner embarking on academic studies in the field.

He began his experimentations first with rubber before advancing to cast lead and then finally steel, a material whose properties and building potential he understood innately thanks to time spent working in steel mills during his early years in California. The opportunity to study art at Yale University changed his life thereafter.

To be amongst his masterworks at either the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dia Beacon, or Glenstone Museum, or see one of his many focused exhibitions mounted in America or abroad, was to experience the profoundness of materiality combined with scale and dimension in its purest form. 

Serra wanted to remind us that art helps therapeutically present what is absent in one’s life innately at the time of viewing, whether rendered in painting, drawings, or his own progressively curvilinear work. He also referenced the role heavy manufacturing has played in the development of this country as an industrial democracy. 

He said: “To see is to think, and to think is to see”, meaning that the in-person experience of space and objects is incomparable – a notion missing from the current state of architectural criticism. Many architects, including his creative partner in the recent Glenstone expansion, Thomas Phifer, and Peter Eisenman, worked with Serra over his six-decade career to realize visions that began in his studio and were further inspired by classical art and modern painting. 

“There are comparable overlaps in the language between sculpture and architecture, between painting and architecture. There are overlaps between all kinds of human activities. But there are also differences that have gone on for centuries. Architects are higher in the pecking order than sculptors, we all know that, but they can't have it both ways,” he quipped in a memorable 2002 New Yorker profile.

Serra's last major pieces were made in Qatar. He passed away at his home on Long Island, where he had resided for many years with his wife Clara.