36+ Richard Serra Quotes On Art, Education And Artwork

Richard Serra is an American sculptor known for his large-scale abstract steel sculptures. He is one of the most influential and celebrated sculptors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His works are often site-specific and explore the relationship between the viewer, the space, and the sculpture. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Richard Serra on art, life, education.

Top 10 Richard Serra Quotes

1. I consider space to be a material. The articulation of space has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct.
2. On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.
3. Everything we choose in life for its lightness soon reveals its unbearable weight.
4. The thing about coming back to the Bay Area, it's like coming home for me.
5. I think you always have to find where the boundary is in relation to the context in order to be able to kind of articulate how you want the space to interact with the viewer.
6. Basically, what you really want to do is try to engage the viewer's body relation to his thinking and walking and looking, without being overly heavy-handed about it.
7. 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.'
8. But I'll try to immerse myself in as many of the formal characteristics of site as possible in the landscape.
9. I started working for Bethlehem Steel when I was about 16 during the summers.
10. I used to eat lunch with Billy Wilder when I first came out here.

Richard Serra Short Quotes

• But I don't think of any particular viewer in mind other than myself.
• To see is to think, and to think is to see.
• Your eye is a muscle, you have to keep it in shape and the more you draw, the more you see.
• Most of what you see in architecture are watered-down ideas of sculptors who have come before.

Richard Serra Quotes About Art

But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be. — Richard Serra

When I moved into making sculpture, I could handle steel the way it had been handled in the technological revolution. I could use it the way bridge builders used it; I could use it the way they used it in industry and building and not the way it had been used in art. — Richard Serra

Play is a necessary ingredient in art because there is a kind of wonder that goes on when you play. You're directing your activity toward a conclusion that isn't prescribed by a particular method. — Richard Serra

Art is not democratic. It is not for the people. — Richard Serra

Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful. — Richard Serra

Richard Serra Quotes About Work

If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you're passing on only a residue of your concerns... You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you're denying the real content of the work. — Richard Serra

I think different people have different problems and different relations to the exhibition of their work. — Richard Serra

And certainly the history of public sculpture has been disastrous but that doesn't mean it ought not to continue and the only way it even has a chance to continue is if the work gets out into the public. — Richard Serra

Work out of your work. Don't work out of anybody else's work. — Richard Serra

I think this, I think basically I'm not interested in people following my work or making work like my work. — Richard Serra

If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception. — Richard Serra

Richard Serra Quotes About Content

Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading. — Richard Serra

Now when you have administrators deciding what sexuality is, and what's a taboo and what's not in terms of content, you got guys, like, Trent Lott who equates homosexuality with a disease. — Richard Serra

They've also, the government's decided now, what sexual content is. — Richard Serra

Richard Serra Famous Quotes And Sayings

Time and movement became really crucial to how I deal with what I deal with - not only sight and boundary, but how one walks through a piece, and what one feels and registers in terms of one's own body in relation to another body. — Richard Serra

But you have to take all of those things, you have to take into consideration the paths, the roadways, how much cloud cover there is, how much foliage cover there is, whether there are streams, all of that comes into play. — Richard Serra

If you get it out into the urban field it's going to be used or misused but it'll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day. — Richard Serra

The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes. — Richard Serra

What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are. — Richard Serra

It could be that people want to consume sculpture the way they consume paintings - through photographs... I'm interested in the experience of sculpture in the place where it resides. — Richard Serra

I thought Out of Action was better as a catalogue than the honeycomb because the honeycomb was like walking into one compartment and then another compartment. — Richard Serra

The thing about rigging is, you can learn it if you become a master rigger but there's no book on rigging. — Richard Serra

Life Lessons by Richard Serra

1. Richard Serra's work emphasizes the importance of scale and material in art, teaching us to consider how a work of art interacts with its environment.
2. His use of industrial materials and large-scale installations demonstrate the potential of sculpture to create powerful experiences for viewers.
3. His work also encourages us to think about the ways in which art can be used to challenge traditional notions of space and form.