Richard Serra’s Lasting Legacy of Exploring Artistic Boundaries

A journey through the concept of space

Admiring one of Richard Serra’s sculptures (Photo by Karsten Koehn on Unsplash)

Richard Serra, known for his monumental steel sculptures, passed away on Tuesday at 85 in Orient, New York. He is one of those artists whose work is instantly recognized by more people than his name; it’s a bit like Calder’s innovative and colorful mobiles. Serra’s sculptures imprint themselves on your memories, and the first association isn’t the artist’s name, but instead, you think of the place where you last saw one of his works.

When reflecting on Serra’s passing, the first memory is of his work at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. It was in the summer of 2016, and I tried to escape the heat of Madrid after exploring the best-known museums in Spain’s capital. The most impactful moment was seeing the famous Valázquez painting of the ladies-in-waiting during the reign of Philip IV. Las Meninas teaches visitors a lesson in viewing, reality, and experiencing space.

Madrid

Wherever I went in Spain’s capital, I received suggestions to go north instead of the famous south of Spain. I was rereading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and decided to stop postponing a decades-old wish to visit Pamplona, where his alter-ego arrived with his expat friends for a grand fiesta of drinking, exploring bars, and irritating and loving each other.

After seeing Picasso’s Guernica for the first time, at a rare moment of being the only visitor to admire La Reina Sofia’s most famous painting, I wanted to visit the real Guernica in the Basque Country, the town bombed to rubble by the German and Italian fascists in 1937.

The Basque Country

The relentless heat also beckoned me to drive north to the Basque Country. The Bay of Biscay’s low-pressure systems and mild air, helped by less sunshine and high rainfall, usually moderate summer temperatures on the hot Iberian peninsula. The annual temperature range is low compared to other cities at this latitude.

However, climate statistics are an average of the weather and don’t guarantee the mild temperatures you may wish for in a Spanish summer. I drove north to arrive in Bilbao in a windless heatwave of 42 degrees Celsius. I remember taking this photo, projecting a wishful image of the Ice Age movie above a thermometer. Our lives in the Anthropocene will be defined by more extreme weather, and we will more frequently experience these kinds of extreme heat waves.

Bilbao during a heatwave in 2016 (photo by author)

My first stop after an ice cream shop was the Guggenheim Museum. It is the top attraction that any first-time visitor is drawn to. On this day, even those who didn’t plan to go there needed no convincing to experience the cooling qualities of the remarkable titanium-clad structure. 

At the entrance, I passed one of Louise Bourgeois’ massive spiders; she is another example of a sculptor whose work is recognized by many more people than her name. When living in Ottawa, I daily pass another one of her works, a bronze and stainless steel spider known as Maman.

Bourgeois created it some 25 years ago when she was 88. At about ten meters high, it is among the world’s largest. A remarkable detail is the 32 marble eggs visible under its belly. I often see kids standing under the spider and looking up in fascination at those mysterious eggs.

Spider by Louise Bourgeois, Bilbao, 2016 (photo by author)

The Matter of Time

Serra’s famous work in Bilbao was the first art I encountered in the museum. Like Bourgeois, he preferred to work on large-scale projects; his eye-catching installation, The Matter of Time, is a good example. It shows his characteristic use of weathered steel, which you would expect to use in the large-scale construction industry. 

His father’s profession likely explains his fascination for working with steel. He was an immigrant from the island of Majorca and worked as a pipe fitter on a Californian shipyard during the Second World War when Richard was about four years old.

Serra had a way of creating a sense of grace and elegance into the heavy, rusty material, resulting in structures you would not expect to find in a museum. His approach was new, daring, and refreshing. Seeing massive chunks of rusty metal in a museum was, before Serra, as rare as obesity in a classical ballet performance.

Serra’s concept of space

However, Serra preferred to steer the attention away from the metal and instead focus on a different material: space. I had read about his views on space, but only when walking through his maze-like constructions, did I experience the power of emptiness. Like Hemingway’s writings, he could create memorable art through bold statements and content without showing, mentioning, or writing it.

Serra would have mentioned a different source of inspiration: Velazquez’s Las Meninas, at first glance, quite a different approach to art, but both artists played with the concept of experiencing space and perspectives in revolutionary new ways.

One of the eight elements that form The Matter of Time, Bilbao, 2016 (photo by author)

Exploring The Matter of Time feels like experiencing a transformation of space. His heavyweight work on the ground floor of the Bilbao Guggenheim is now almost as famous as the iconic museum. It consists of eight gigantic elements, large enough to walk through. The thick steel plates show an elegance and grace that contrasts with the shipyard building material you would expect to find.

Guernica

My own explorations continued after Bilbao. I visited Guernica, where not much reminded of the horrific bombing some 80 years before, and continued to Pamplona. Little did I know that this visit to one of Hemingway’s favorite cities, which he kept returning to for many years, would trigger far more travel than I had ever planned.

While driving through the Basque Country, I saw several pilgrims walking along the roads. Most of them bowed forward slightly, carrying their shell-adorned backpacks and using classic wooden staffs or modern hiking poles.

I had not given them much attention until I walked behind a slightly limping pilgrim on the road leading to the cathedral where Hemingway tried to focus on prayer but failed, an episode he describes in Fiesta. The pilgrim turned right just before the cathedral and walked into a converted church filled with bunk beds and dozens of other pilgrims. 

Camino de Santiago

It finally dawned on me that I witnessed a 1200-year-old tradition of pilgrims who had started their journey in cities and villages all over Europe to walk to Santiago de Compostela.

In the evening, I saw hundreds of pilgrims drinking and eating together in the streets around the central square of Pamplona. I wondered how they all knew each other, and their camaraderie seemed to be built on many years of intense friendships.

Café Iruña in Pamplona, a famous Hemingway hangout (photo by author)

Six years later, I also walked into Pamplona on the third day of my first pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Wildfires kept me from continuing further west; the numbers of pilgrims swelled, and Hemingway would have enjoyed the nightly Fiesta atmosphere in the bars while the first blisters of the stalled hikers had time to heal.

I would continue walking west for another thirty days. About a week after leaving Pamplona, I walked out of the ancient city of Burgos. From then on, the route is for about ten days through the seemingly endless hot and flat part of northern Spain known as the Meseta. In that barren landscape, I experienced space differently. Perspectives change when you walk to a horizon that doesn’t seem to come any nearer and in an area where the dry fields on both sides of the track never seem to change.

In such a landscape, walking the Camino in the early morning darkness makes the slow return of light and colors a magical experience, one that is defined by all that is absent. Just a few hours west of Burgos, pilgrims stop to admire the Meseta’s first and perhaps most iconic view. It is the postcard view of a winding, seemingly endless path that meanders down into a yellowish-brown flatland. Buy a walking guide for the Camino; this photo is on the cover.

The Meseta (photo by author, 2022)

Serra never walked the Camino de Santiago, but I wonder what he would have liked to construct on this magical spot. Looking at one of his landscape sculptures from the early 1970s may give an idea. When invited to contribute to the outdoors part of the Kröller-Möller Museum in the Netherlands, he chose a small bowl-shaped valley to create a new work. By placing three enormous steel plates at the foot of the valley, he created screens while keeping the center of the valley as an open space. This project is comparable to one I remember seeing in northern Denmark in the beautiful art haven of Louisiana, not far from where Karen Blixen lived before she went to Africa. His construction changed the familiar, inward-looking character of the valley into an imaginary movement that draws attention outward.

We will never know if he would have used a similar approach on this spot on the Camino. Still, I enjoy the mind experiment of Serra intervening in space to create another experience of space, which is characteristic of his oeuvre.

I can also imagine Serra working on another sculpture at a spot pilgrims pass after about a week of walking further to the west. After many hours of walking on a single track, it passes another dirt road. It was a dirt crossing where I found myself all alone and wondered how much further this monotonous landscape would continue. How marvelous it would be if he had made a variety of the only other open-air sculptures I know from Serra in the Netherlands.

Serra’s solid steel cylinder in the Netherlands

He chose the intersection of four paths in the Netherlands and placed a gigantic solid steel cylinder in the middle. It is more than two meters long and weighs more than 5 tons. He made sure to tilt the cylinder slightly, causing the center of the intersection to appear out of balance and giving the spectator a strange experience. The landscape became part of the experience, and if he had experimented with such a structure in that lonely open space of the Meseta, it could have had a magical effect through a unique interpretation of space.

Seeing it this way, walking through The Matter of Time in Bilbao is like walking a mini-Camino, a brief moment to experience space differently. This leaves the question of whether it is possible to experience time differently during a short museum visit. I doubt it, for that, you will have to walk the real thing.

After researching, I concluded that Hemingway walked a few kilometers of the Camino de Santiago near Burguette. That path is the most pleasant of those 800 Camino kilometers. It follows a lovely shaded, green, flat, and winding road. Nature’s calming impact on Hemingway is still visible since this is the only moment I remember from The Sun Also Rises when he is happy and doesn’t feel any tension with some of his expat friends.

I would like to know if Serra’s name recognition will increase over the years. His works may remain more recognizable than his name. For Hemingway, it may be the other way around; everyone knows his name, even those who have never read one of his books.

The tragedy of artists is that they will never know how we will remember them. Vincent van Gogh would be pleased to know that billions of people instantly recognize his name and works. Even his first name is familiar, a rare honor shared with Elvis.

If you ever visit Spain, I hope you will see Valázquez’s Las Meninas in the Prado in Madrid, stroll through the streets of Pamplona, and visit the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to experience space differently in Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time.

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