Richard Serra quotes

Richard Serra was an American sculptor renowned for his monumental minimalist steel works. His large-scale installations often invite viewers to interact with and move through the space they occupy. He transformed the boundaries of contemporary sculpture and remains a major influence in the art world. Here are 29 of his quotes:

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."

Richard Serra

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

Richard Serra

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.

Richard Serra

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

Richard Serra

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

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

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

Richard Serra

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.

Richard Serra

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

Richard Serra

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

Richard Serra

(.. 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.

Richard Serra

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

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

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

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

I started working for Bethlehem Steel when I was about 16 during the summers.

Richard Serra

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.

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

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.

Richard Serra

But I'll try to immerse myself in as many of the formal characteristics of site as possible in the landscape.

Richard Serra

I used to eat lunch with Billy Wilder when I first came out here.

Richard Serra

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

Richard Serra