Serra’s often gigantic sculptures were usually composed of enormous slabs of corten steel, made in factories that normally manufacture ship hulls. They were sometimes so heavy that they had to be placed in the location desired by Serra using bridges and cranes.
The sculptor, who was born in 1938 in the American city of San Francisco, had actually wanted to become a painter. Instead, from the 1960s onwards he created a furore with the ‘monumental environments’ that he constructed from steel. The ‘immense tilting corridors, ellipses and spirals’ gave his works an ‘abstract grandeur and physical intimacy’, according to The New York Times.
Serra’s most famous works combine the scale of ancient temples with the inscrutability of monuments like Stonehenge. However, his work is separate from religion, he said several times. Serra was concerned with distorting spaces, for example through the use of crooked, curved or circular walls. He himself said about his work that it required ‘a lot of walking and looking’.
Cancer in left eye
Several years ago, Serra was diagnosed by his doctors with cancer of the tear duct in his left eye. The remedy was simple, he was told: the eye had to be removed. He refused, because it would endanger his eyesight and therefore his work as an artist. He died of pneumonia.
Several works by Serra can be seen in the Netherlands. In the Voorlinden museum in Wassenaar, visitors can walk through Serra’s sculptural maze Open Ended (2007-2008). Serra’s largest landscape artwork in Europe is located in Zeewolde, Netherlands. Serra made this work, SeaLevel named in 1996. It consists of two concrete walls, each 200 meters long, which indicate how high the water would be if the dikes in the area were to break. It is one of only four outdoor works of art in the world that Serra had constructed from concrete.
In 2023, the artist himself contributed 750 thousand euros for the renovation and maintenance of SeaLevel. Demolishing and rebuilding the work will cost a total of 1 million euros.
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