Richard Serra: Afangar Icelandic Series is the first exhibition of Richard Serra’s most ambitious set of prints to date, more than a dozen heavily encrusted etchings that the artist calls intaglio constructions. Made to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gemini G.E.L., the works in the series employ the visual vocabulary of a recent project of Serra’s in which he had very tall monoliths of Icelandic basalt placed in pairs along the perimeter of a small island near Reykjavik. In the etchings, made at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles in 1991, densely black forms have been printed on roughly textured paper affixed in the printing process to two layers of Oriental paper. These imposing images loom upward from the lower edges of the sheets, starkly evoking the environment that inspired them.
Organized by Riva Castleman, director of the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books.
