Bilbao - Guggenheim Museum - Richard Serra's Snake
On June 2005 the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened to the public a permanent installation: The Matter of Time by sculptor Richard Serra (San Francisco, USA 1939). It includes seven monumental site-specific sculptures commissioned by the Museum for its Permanent Collection. Installed in the largest gallery of the Museum designed by Frank Gehry, they would join Serra’s Snake, 1994–7 (created for the opening of the Museum), in a site–specific indoors installation of a scale and dimension without precedent in modern history. The eight sculptures altogether generate an experience that also includes the large exhibition space where they are shown.
Serra’s artistic activity in the 1960s coincided with the emergence of minimalism, a movement with which he shared many interests. This art movement attempted to achieve the maximum expression through the minimum means, giving great importance to the properties of the material and to the process of fabrication. These artists sought to liberate sculpture from its symbolic role and from the traditional base or pedestal, so that the work takes on a new relationship with the viewer. Experiencing the object becomes an essential part of the work. Like minimalists, Serra used industrial materials, uncommon for sculpture at the time; he created works in fiberglass, neon and rubber. In his sculpture Belts, 1966–1967, he used tangled pieces of vulcanized rubber lit with curved neon tubes, and then suspends them from hooks throughout a wall. By hanging them, Serra explores the flexibility of these urban, industrial materials and the effect of gravity on them. The importance he gave to the physical qualities of material continues to characterize his later work.
Bilbao - Guggenheim Museum - Richard Serra's Snake
On June 2005 the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened to the public a permanent installation: The Matter of Time by sculptor Richard Serra (San Francisco, USA 1939). It includes seven monumental site-specific sculptures commissioned by the Museum for its Permanent Collection. Installed in the largest gallery of the Museum designed by Frank Gehry, they would join Serra’s Snake, 1994–7 (created for the opening of the Museum), in a site–specific indoors installation of a scale and dimension without precedent in modern history. The eight sculptures altogether generate an experience that also includes the large exhibition space where they are shown.
Serra’s artistic activity in the 1960s coincided with the emergence of minimalism, a movement with which he shared many interests. This art movement attempted to achieve the maximum expression through the minimum means, giving great importance to the properties of the material and to the process of fabrication. These artists sought to liberate sculpture from its symbolic role and from the traditional base or pedestal, so that the work takes on a new relationship with the viewer. Experiencing the object becomes an essential part of the work. Like minimalists, Serra used industrial materials, uncommon for sculpture at the time; he created works in fiberglass, neon and rubber. In his sculpture Belts, 1966–1967, he used tangled pieces of vulcanized rubber lit with curved neon tubes, and then suspends them from hooks throughout a wall. By hanging them, Serra explores the flexibility of these urban, industrial materials and the effect of gravity on them. The importance he gave to the physical qualities of material continues to characterize his later work.