Serra firma

摘要

It was in Borromini's church, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, in Rome that Richard Serra first saw the light a decade ago. "I was standing in a side aisle, looking at the oval space on the floor and the same oval on the ceiling, called a Borromini ellipse. I thought they were at right angles to each other. When I moved to the central aisle, I realised I was wrong. But I kept on wondering: how can I create-how can I actually make-my misrepresentation?"rnWhether it is his drawings (made with melted paintsticks), his famous Torqued Ellipses or the Torqued Toruses described above, the quest to change procedure and make something unforeseen has been at the heart of much of what the 69-year-old American artist has done. In his early years Mr Serra preferred not to work in steel, which he had known from the second world war when his father worked as a pipefitter in a shipyard. "It was the most traditional material of the 20th century." Only, he says, when he was able to imagine using steel's weight, gravity, mass, cantilever and balance did its potential in art begin to interest him.