The David Zwirner Art Gallery announced a new exhibition showcasing six significant drawings by the American minimalist and colossi-sculpting artist Richard Serra, who recently passed last March.
Aptly entitled: "Richard Serra: Six Large Drawings," the show is held at the gallery's 24 Grafton Street location in London and started welcoming visitors this past Tuesday, April 9, and will run until May 18.
About 'Richard Serra: Six Large Drawings'
Although Serra was mainly known for his skyscraper-tall and site-specific sculptures, the artist also consistently drew illustrations, that were equally as impressive, throughout his expansive career.
He began in 1971 and employed a black painstick created using compressed oil paint, wax, and a pigment to draw these masterpieces. 'Six Large Drawings' is the last exhibition put together by the artist during his lifetime, and his ode to the larger-than-life sketches he conceived.
Headlining the exhibition are two of Serra's gigantic diptychs, dated from the early 1990s; two works from his "Greenpoint Rounds," which he began working on in 2009; and two multi-panel "Rift" drawings that he did starting in 2011.
According to a press release from the gallery, Serra described the diptychs as "masses in relation to each other," saying, " They are not about composition or figure-ground. They emphasize the comparison of different weights in juxtaposition."
"The construction of these large horizontal drawings refers to something I observed in Machu Picchu in Peru when I went there in 1974," he continued, recalling the building practices of Machu Picchu stone cutters who would "fit irregular shapes together" using the stones.
That said, as per Serra himself, the diptychs are not a study of those practices but are a manifestation of his "understanding of how forms came together."
As for the on-show pieces from his 2009 series "Greenpoint Rounds," both of which are around eighty inches square, Serra noted that they are the result of his effort to iterate out of his earlier "Rounds" series that he started in 1996.
"What I tried to achieve with the Rounds was to make the mass flood the paper," he explained. " I am trying to obliterate the shape to the degree that what you're looking at is a black field in which a tremendous amount of matter is pulverized into the paper."
Finally, for the multi-panel "Rifts" drawings, contemporary art researcher Neil Cox writes: "They are articulated by "rifts," very thin vertical triangles where the paper is left blank, intersections that mark out the point of division of the constituent sheets."
"The 'Rift' drawings are formidable presences," Cox concludes.
