Richard Serra

Richard Serra was born in San Francisco to a Spanish father who worked as a shipyard pipefitter and a Russian Jewish mother. He worked in steel mills to fund his education at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara before studying painting at Yale University alongside Chuck Close and Brice Marden. Traveling to Europe on a Fulbright grant, Serra abandoned painting for sculpture after encountering the work of Brâncuși.

Serra pioneered process art in the late 1960s, experimenting with molten lead flung against walls and rubber. He soon turned to monumental Cor-Ten steel sheets. Works like Tilted Arc (1981) ignited fierce public debates over public art, while his monumental installation The Matter of Time (2005) at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao established him as one of the greatest sculptors of modern history. Serra's curved, towering steel walls forced viewers to physically navigate weight, balance, and spatial disorientation.