Richard Serra

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.
—Richard Serra

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of recent drawings by Richard Serra, executed between 2007 and 2010.

Throughout his career, Serra has made drawings as separate, immediate, and fundamental lines of investigation to his sculptures. They are explorations in their own right, integral to the overall concerns of his sculptural practice, and unique intuitive explorations within their own established criteria. Using black paintstick or oilstick, heated to a viscous and sometimes fluid state, he creates elemental forms through direction action on the paper and the accretion of medium. These drawings are self-referential: they do not imply surface and weight but rather they are surface and weight.

Dreiser (2009) and Artaud (2010) are from the Greenpoint Rounds series. In these works, which each measure almost two meters square, a large black circle is embedded in the surface of the heavy paper. Serra uses paintstick, heating it to a viscous and sometimes fluid state. He slowly builds up the dense and irregular form so that the unique surface of each drawing appears as a palpable structure. Each drawing exerts a vastly different energy and exudes a singular character. Other works in the exhibition, such as Stratum 12 and Tracks #47, feature black arcs to the right or left of the paper. As the dense pigment in these works absorbs and dissipates light, the sheer mass and volume of the drawing emerge from the surface as a declarative presence of thick contracting and retaining accumulations.