ROTTERDAM.- Richard Serra is presenting two new series of works, made exclusively for his exhibition Drawings 2015 – 2017 at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen announced Richard Serra: Drawings 2015 – 2017 , the first public presentation of the artist’s most recent drawings. The exhibition, created in close collaboration with the artist, consists of more than 80 works, from smaller to large-scale drawings, including works from the Ramble drawings (2015), the Composites (2016), and the Rifts (2011–17). For this exhibition, Richard Serra has exclusively executed the series Rotterdam Horizontals (2016–17) and Rotterdam Verticals (2016 – 17), that are being shown for the first time, as well as a number of private sketchbooks never exhibited before.

Constantly searching for new expressive languages, Serra has created many series of drawings that – while independent of his sculptures – correspond to the founding elements of his sculptural language: time, process, and materiality. The works presented in this exhibition depart radically from his previous drawings: they are intimate, direct and executed with an economy of means, and as such, reveal a characteristic to Serra’s output that is unknown to many.

Richard Serra is an internationally renowned artist whose work has decisively contributed to the evolution of modern sculpture, yet drawing as a practice has always been integral to his oeuvre. It is challenging to deeply understand his practice and motivations without analysing Serra’s production on paper: these works carry an emphasis of the physical activity and the energy, dynamism and spontaneity, that everyone can relate to.

Francesco Stocchi, curator of modern and contemporary art at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, comments: “Serra’s significance as an artist is in no small part attributable to his understanding and rethinking of what sculpture actually is: what matters to him is not what a drawing ‘means’ but what emerges from the process of producing it. This exhibition reveals the breadth of Serra’s current practice, it opens new ways of looking at how the artist has worked over the past five decades and heralds new directions in his exploration of the medium as well as the role and possibilities of drawing.”

Richard Serra: Drawings 2015 – 2017 continues Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s special relationship with Richard Serra, not only because of the exhibition history spanning over 40 years and the holdings in the collection, but also thanks to the artist’s sculpture Waxing Arcs (1980), that is permanently installed in the ground floor spaces of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by Steidl Publishers, examining the artist’s drawing practice. The publication includes essays by Francesco Stocchi and Neil Cox, together with an updated, in-depth biography, or “Drawing chronology” by Michelle White.

Curated by Francesco Stocchi, Curator of modern and contemporary art at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.