Richard Serra, who has died aged 85, was a remarkable cultural figure – a sculptor who belonged to the generation of American minimalists, was associated with process art and made experimental films, yet evoked something of an earlier, more heroic age. The critic Robert Hughes described him as “the last abstract expressionist”.
Although this statement stretches the point, Serra’s interest in the processes of sculpture led him to some extravagant gestural acts that belie the severity of his grand public commissions. Weight and Measure, made in the early 1990s for what is now Tate Britain, exemplified his austere side, with its massive steel forms designed to counter the building’s overbearing classicism. However, some of his other works, such as the twisting, “torqued” structures installed at the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 2005, are positively baroque.
