Installation video
Installation view
Artwork © Richard Serra/DACS, London, 2018. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
Artwork © Richard Serra/DACS, London, 2018. Photo: Mike Bruce
Richard Serra
Triple Rift #3, 2018
Paintstick on handmade Japanese paper, 9 feet 3 inches × 22 feet (2.82 × 6.71 m)
© Richard Serra/DACS, London, 2018. Photo: Rob McKeever
Richard Serra
Quadruple Rift, 2017
Paintstick on handmade Japanese paper, 9 feet 2 inches × 26 feet 10 inches (2.79 × 8.17 m)
The Menil Collection, Houston, Purchased with funds provided by Louisa Stude Sarofim
© Richard Serra/DACS, London, 2018. Photo: Rob McKeever
I use black because it is a color that doesn’t transport elusive emotions.
—Richard Serra
Gagosian is pleased to present Rifts, an exhibition of recent drawings by Richard Serra.
The Rifts get their name from the distinctive white shapes—elongated triangles—that punctuate their otherwise unrelenting tarmac blackness, and perhaps from the geological term for a rent in the earth’s surface caused by moving tectonic plates. These sharp-edged triangular rifts are negative shapes, the white of the blank paper. An invention in drawing but one demanding their own rigor, they happen at the junction of two sheets of paper.
The stringent intelligible structures of the Rift Drawings obstruct us from seeing their white divisions expressively as other kinds of rupture—psychological, historical, ontological. Yet minimal metaphors of drawing remain: tension, balance, presence, space. The imposing scale and gross materiality of the Rifts hover just long enough on this border, perhaps, to make us more conscious of the operations of metaphor in our relationship to drawing.
In this video, musical ensemble Sō Percussion performs Steve Reich’s “Music for Pieces of Wood” inside the exhibition Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage), 1992, at Gagosian, New York.
Violinist Alina Ibragimova performs Bach’s Sonata for Solo Violin No. 1 in G Major: Adagio (BWV 1001, c. 1720) from within Richard Serra’s sculpture Transmitter (2020) at Gagosian, Le Bourget. Organized by Bold Tendencies, a nonprofit organization that commissions artists to produce site-specific projects and present performances, in collaboration with Gagosian, this recorded performance took place on May 8, 2022 before a live concert of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time, 1941).
Cellist Mario Brunello performs Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major: Prelude (BWV 1007, c. 1717–23) within Richard Serra’s sculpture Transmitter (2020) at Gagosian, Le Bourget. Organized by Bold Tendencies—a nonprofit that commissions artists to produce site-specific projects and present performances—in collaboration with Gagosian, this recorded performance took place on May 8, 2022, before a live concert of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time, 1941).
In response to enduring racial injustices and the recent widespread civil unrest, Richard Serra urges people to watch this video commentary by Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show.
For eleven years, from 1968 to 1979, Richard Serra created a collection of films and videos that felt out the uncharted phenomenological boundaries of the medium. Carlos Valladares explores a selection of these works.
The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.
Paul Goldberger tracks the evolution of Mitchell and Emily Rales’s Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. Set amid 230 acres of pristine landscape and housing a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art, this graceful complex of pavilions, designed by architects Thomas Phifer and Partners, opened to the public in the fall of 2018.
