Recently I experienced Richard Serra’s Sequence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I loved it. What an amazing and wonderful thing it is to be able to walk inside -- to be inside -- this work of art.
Best explained by the wall text at SFMOMA:
“Serra was raised in the Sunset District of San Francisco and worked in East Bay steel mills as a teenager. Throughout his career he has investigated both the physical impact of sculpture on the surrounding space and its psychological impact on viewers. Of his large-scale works, Serra has noted: ‘I found very important the idea of the body passing through space, and the body’s movement not being predicated totally on image or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement.’
Sequence consists of two vast, torqued steel ellipses connected by an S-shape to create a winding path through which we experience the sculptures’ massive leaning walls and graceful curves. It was made in a German steel fabrication plant that has worked closely with Serra for nearly twenty years to develop machinery and manufacturing spaces capable of achieving his complex forms. The first artwork to be placed in the new SFMOMA, Sequence was installed here in spring 2015, and the unfinished gallery’s exterior walls were built around it.“
