Richard Serra

Art Brokerage: Richard Serra American Artist: b. 1939. Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939, and studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara. While at Santa Barbara, he studied art with Howard Warshaw and Rico Lebrun. On the West Coast, he helped support himself by working in steel mills, which was to have a strong influence on his later work. After studying painting with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture between 1961 and 1964, Serra continued his training abroad, spending a year each in Florence and Paris. In 1964, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for Rome. Since then, he has lived in New York, where he first used rubber in 1966 and began applying his characteristic work material lead in 1968. Since 1971, Serra has focused not only on sculptural works, but also onlarge-scale drawings on paper using various techniques. His drawing material is the paintstick, a wax-like grease crayon. Serra melts several paintsticks to form large pigment blocks. Major presentations of Serra's graphic oeuvre include exhibitions at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, in 1990; at Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1992; and at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, in 2008.