Richard Serra

Richard Serra (November 2, 1939 – March 26, 2024) was an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large scale assemblies of sheet metal.

Charlie Rose interview (2001)

 * Charlie Rose interview (14 November 2001)


 * I think if you want to make art, at some point you have to suspend judgment, and you have to involve yourself with play and not worry about the outcome.


 * I was in analysis and I told my analyst I wanted to be the best sculptor in the world and he said: "Richard, calm down."


 * Space, as my work evolved, really became my subject.


 * The steel and the space, or the object and the void, become one and the same.


 * Basically, that is my subject: I use steel to organize space.


 * To see is to think, and to think is to see.


 * Most of what you see in architecture are watered-down ideas of sculptors who have come before.


 * Don't start telling me buildings are works of art, because I don't buy it.

Charlie Rose interview (2013)

 * Charlie Rose interview (December 27, 2013)


 * "You can talk about the 'how' and the 'what', but "when you get to the "why" it gets a little more difficult."


 * "With any work of art, what happens is if you're open to seeing it you probably have a sensation," he tells the talk show host, "and that sensation leads to an experience and that experience is private and deals with your background, where you were born, what you've been exposed to, who you know, what your education was; and it will lead to other ways of thinking about other things."


 * " (..as a practicing artist) You're competing against who came before and came after. You're just another stone in the wall, and if you make a contribution you're lucky."

Quotes about Serra

 * Probably the most original and significant sculptor of his generation, certainly the most provocative.
 * Michael Kimmelman, in "At The Met and The Modern with: Richard Serra; One Provocateur Inspired by Another" in The New York Times (11 August 1995)