Over the course of almost a year, from the spring of 1996 to the summer of 1997, Richard Serra embarked on a series of oilstick drawings that pushed the boundaries of his work on paper. With dense, black paintstick or oilstick heated to a viscous state, he created what became his Rounds series by dramatically applying, layering, and building up the pigment to almost three-dimensional thickness. Each drawing was named after a significant jazz or blues musician as a nod to the improvisational, riff-like style of their creation. Serra exhibited the finished works at Gagosian Gallery in December 2007 with art critic Ken Johnson remarking of their drama and tension: “Smudges, smears, accretions and other random marks create an impression of atmospheric agitation around the implosive ball.”
Drawing gives me an immediate return for my effort and the result is commensurate with my involvement. It is an activity that requires solitude, it is the most concentrated space in which I work. - Richard Serra
Serra often makes drawings as part of fundamental investigations into his sculptures, and this series was no different; he was fabricating his iconic Torqued Ellipses sculptures during the same period, massive sculptures of weathered steel inspired by Francesco Borromini’s church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1646) in Rome. He considers his explorations on paper to be integral to his sculptural practice as well as unique works in their own right. Not long after completing the series, Serra worked with his preferred print workshop, Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, to produce etchings using deeply bitten plates which resulted in highly textured, sophisticated, and dramatic prints that manage to communicate a similar weight and monumentality to that of his three-dimensional works.
Benjamin Pardo and David Gresham are passionate collectors and trained architects and industrial designers with decades of experience in the design industry.
Altogether, Pardo and Gresham’s work and interviews have been featured in over thirty publications including
The New York Times,
Domus, Dwell, Elle Décor, and Architectural Digest.
Pardo was president of the Italian manufacturer Unifor for 17 years before joining Knoll in 2005, where he remained for over 15 years and served as a senior vice president and design director, redefining everything from their global product portfolio to the company’s showrooms and retail architecture. Over the course of his career he has collaborated with and guided the work of Marc Newson, Piero Lissoni, Antonio Citterio and countless others, and curated and renewed the work of Florence Knoll, Mies Van Der Rohe, Harry Bertoia, and George Nakashima, to name but a few. Now, he is a professor of interior architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Pardo’s partner, award-winning designer David Gresham, worked as vice president of design at Fitch, Steelcase, and Wet Design and, since 2011, has run his own design consulting business. Gresham also co-founded Design Logic while a student at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 1980s, a short-lived but influential company that helped change the design landscape and practices in the United States and abroad. Altogether, Pardo and Gresham’s work and interviews have been featured in over thirty publications including The New York Times, Domus, Dwell, Elle Décor, and Architectural Digest.
Pardo and Gresham’s genuine love of architecture and design and nuanced understanding of how the two co-exist results in a harmonious, layered, visually stimulating collection in which various pieces riff off of one another...
The couple’s considerable experience with design and architecture informs their impeccable ability to combine a variety of modern objects, furniture, and art into what has been described as a cozy, livable form of modernism. They have a particular fondness for Ettore Sottsass’s designs and amassed an impressive array of his ceramics, furniture, and lighting, which they balance with Scandinavian and American modern pieces by Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Hans Wegner, and stark, geometric artworks by Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, and Richard Serra. While such an amalgamation of styles could become dissonant and overwhelming, Pardo and Gresham’s genuine love of architecture and design and nuanced understanding of how the two co-exist results in a harmonious, layered, visually stimulating collection in which various pieces riff off of one another: the black of Kelly’s geometric prints continues in the custom black Wegner valet chair and bench, Judd’s bright, hard-edged rectangles call to the architectonic, equally colorful Sottsass vases and teapots, Calder’s black, white, and red tapestry calls to the similarly hued but stylistically different metal flowers by Gherardo Frassa, and so on.
Pardo remarked in a 2008 interview about his and Gresham’s New York apartment that “you don’t want to look at superfluous things.” This thoughtful approach to building a space is evident in each and every work they acquired.
For me, weight is a value, not because it is more irresistible than lightness, but simply because I know more about weight than lightness, and therefore I have more to say about it....When each thing is truly in balance, it becomes weightless.
Richard Serra
Richard Serra 1938–2024
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938 and studied at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara from 1957 to 1961, where he received a BA in English literature, before moving across the country to complete his BFA and MFA in painting at Yale University from 1961 to 1964. While at Yale, Serra worked with Josef Albers on his book The Interaction of Color (1963) and received prestigious fellowships which allowed him to spend a few years working in Europe and northern Africa. The young artist was given his first solo exhibition in 1966 at Galleria La Salita, Rome. He moved back to the United States later that year, settling in New York among a circle of friends that included Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson.
By the late 1960s, Serra began making innovative sculptures using materials like rubber, lead, and steel, a path that led him to become one of the most important sculptors of the late 20th century. Rather than focusing on the metaphorical or allegorical qualities of sculpture, Serra focused on the literal, employing the very weight and nature of his chosen materials to create three-dimensional experiences. His works are to be walked around, to, and in. Philosopher John Rajchman writes of his creations: “Into our movements in space Serra’s works induce trajectories that cannot be centered in the usual relations of subjectivity and objectivity, inside and outside—that try to defeat space’s habitual coordinates (up, down, right, left, high, low), unmooring us from our usual sense of orientation, of ‘being there.’”
Serra has been honored with solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany (1978); the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (1984); the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany (1985); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1986). He received the Wilhelm Lehmbruck prize for sculpture in Duisburg in 1991 and, just one year later, a retrospective at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In 1993, Serra was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His notable prizes and awards include a J. Paul Getty Medal (2018) awarded in honor of extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and support of the arts; the Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, Republic of France (2015); Orden de las Artes y las Letras de España, Spain (2008); Orden pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, Federal Republic of Germany (2002); Leone d’Oro for lifetime achievement, Venice Biennale, Italy (2001); Praemium Imperiale, Japan Art Association (1994); Carnegie Prize (1985); a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1974); and a Fulbright Grant (1965).
Serra continued to exhibit in both group and solo shows and to produce large-scale steel structures for sites throughout the world well into the 21st century. From 1997 to 1998 his Torqued Ellipses (1997) were exhibited at and acquired by the Dia Center for the Arts, New York. In 2005 eight major works by Serra were installed permanently at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and in 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a major retrospective of his work.
Auction Results Richard Serra
