The American sculptor Richard Serra, who will be 70 next year, has been wrestling with steel since he was 17. In those days, he was working in the steel mills of California, his home state. When he began to produce work of his own, he was classified as a minimalist. Not any more. As the years have gone by, Serra’s brutishly engaging steel sculptures have grown bigger and bigger.
The three large pieces that stand at the centre of his new show at the vast Gagosian Gallery in London must have been as easy to shift into their present locations as rusting steamships. Once, a man died when a Serra fell on him. The shapes of the first two bring together the idea of the doughnut and the idea of the sphere – the gallery list describes this as a pair of “torqued toruses”. But we don’t need to go into the intricacy of their making to feel some response to these works in our pulses. A child will respond, and immediately, with shock, awe and delight, to what Serra is doing. They look a little like giant, ferociously dangerous, vertigo-inducing, splayed-lipped cauldrons.
Walk inside – yes, much of the pleasure resides in the fact that you can enter Serra’s works and wander at your will – and you see that these vast, soaring, enclosing walls of gently oxidising Corten steel (today they look a warm and almost furry, if not velvety, terracotta-ish brown) are leaving oval shapes on the ground. But it is those walls themselves, smooth enough, but also mysteriously streaked and stained, that are so enthralling and disturbing in just about equal measure.
The walls practically scrape the ceiling of this gallery – you almost feel you can see the scratch marks where they didn’t quite make it, as sweating gangs of labouring men heaved and strained them into place. But how exactly – in what particular direction – are they listing and leaning? The fact is that we are never quite sure, because our perception of these shapes seems to change as we walk around and through them. (The Independent)