Sculptor Richard Serra, the “poet of iron,” dies

Famed American artist and sculptor Richard Serra, known for turning curved walls of rusted steel and other malleable materials into large-scale works of art that are now spread around the world, died at his home in Long Island, New York. He was 85 years old.

Considered one of the most prominent sculptors of his generation, the San Francisco native studied painting at Yale University, but devoted himself to sculpture since the 1960s, inspired by trips to Europe.

His death on Tuesday was confirmed in the evening by his attorney John Silberman, whose firm is based in New York. He said it was due to pneumonia.

Known by his colleagues as the “iron poet”, Serra became world famous for his large-scale steel structures, such as monumental arches, spirals and ellipses. He identified closely with the minimalist movement of the 1970s.

Serra’s work began to attract public attention in 1981, when he installed a 120-foot-long (36.5-meter-long) and 12-foot-high (3.6-meter-high) curved raw steel wall that divides Federal Plaza in New York. The sculpture, called “Tilted Arc,” drew swift reaction from the people who work there and fierce demands that it be removed. The sculpture was later removed, but Serra’s popularity in the New York art scene had been cemented.

Most of Serra’s large-scale works are welded in Cor-Ten steel, a type of steel whose oxidation protects the piece made with this material, but he also worked with other non-traditional materials such as rubber, latex, neon, as well as molten lead, which Serra threw against the wall or the floor to create his “Splash” series early in his career.

His works have been installed in landscapes and included in museum collections around the world, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the deserts of Qatar.

In 2005, eight major works by Serra were permanently installed in the Guggenheim Museum in Spain. Carmen Jiménez, the organizer of the exhibition, said that Serra was “without a doubt the most important living sculptor.”

Born to a Russian-Jewish mother and Spanish father in San Francisco, Serra was the second of three children in the family. He began drawing at a young age and was inspired by time spent in a shipyard where his father worked as a pipefitter. Before turning to sculpture, Serra worked in steel foundries to help finance his education at the University of California’s Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses. He then studied at Yale, where he graduated in 1964.