“Drawing is a verb,” said Richard Serra, an artist known for his monumental steel sculptures and thick applications of oil stick on paper. Installed here in tribute to Serra, who died this year at the age of 85, are two works—both extraordinary gifts from the artist—that embody this statement.
In Verb List (1967), Serra compiled a series of what he called “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process.” Such actions (to roll, to splash, to scatter) and conditions (of gravity, of entropy, of time) would inform the artist’s explorations throughout his six-decade career. To make Out-of-Round X (1999), for instance, Serra worked horizontally, using his weight to drive the paint stick into the paper, until its marks became progressively denser and more spattered, ultimately evoking a void. “Since black is the densest color material,” he wrote, “it absorbs and dissipates light to a maximum.”
Organized by Samantha Friedman, Curator, with Rachel Rosin, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints.
