Born in San Francisco in 1939, American sculptor Richard Serra is today one of the world's most widely acclaimed artists. His career has revolutionised the history of contemporary art, testifying to his exceptional creative talent.

'I like to invent new forms.' Over four decades, Richard Serra has created works that have profoundly reshaped traditional concepts of sculpture. Fascinated by raw materials, and especially steel, Richard Serra began his career by challenging the very act of the creation of visual art: protect by a  mask, Serra projected molten lead at arm's length, against a wall. The metal cooled and set at the foot of the vertical surface, giving rise to forms that resembled neither painting nor sculpture. The result was Splashing (1968), an irremovable work that embodied the process of its own making: a chance, 'random' piece that was nonetheless shaped by the artist's hand, a witness to Serra's literal recasting of the essential role of the artist, his approach to the materials with which he works, and the resulting end product. This inaugural act was accompanied by a series of films by Serra himself, exploring this fascination with raw materials, and the questions and issues raised by their handling: Hand Catching Lead (1968) shows the artist's hand trying to catch pieces of lead which have been thrown up into the air. Hands Scraping (1968) shows the hands of Serra and Philip Glass gathering shreds of fibreglass from a floor, until they have completely disappeared from the picture, etc. Each of these works furthers Serra's profound exploration of the means of artistic production, in the context of an art completely detached from any form of subjective expression, any attempt at figurative representation.

Richard Serra's emphasis on the 'process' of art was later expressed in a veritable artistic manifesto, consisting of a list of verbs ('rolling', 'pressing', 'cutting', 'folding', etc.) defining the issues central to his sculptural work. In works such as To Lift (1967), a sculpture consisting of a sheet of rubber that seems to rise up of its own accord, or Thirty-five Feet of Lead Rolled Up (1968) – comprising, as its name suggests, a rolled-up sheet of lead – Serra preserves the essential, raw power of his materials while at the same time animating and enriching them with the energy used to produce this precise form, and none other. The energy of a simple movement, a dynamic embodied in an action 'transfixed', observed by the viewer in the seemingly immobile form of the resulting sculpture.

At this point in his career, Serra was nonetheless aware that his works perpetuated a certain idea of the relationship between the artwork and its context, the sculpture and its supporting plinth or base, even between the form and its essential meaning. Even a sculpture standing directly on the ground uses the latter as a kind of plinth or support. And sculpture was, he felt, all too often conceived as a compositional form used to convey an image. To undermine and obliterate this effect (which he described as sculpture's 'pictorial concern', betraying its essentially figurative approach), Serra created his celebrated sculpture One Ton Prop (House of Cards), also in 1968. Consisting of four sheets of lead, each measuring 122 cm square, this revolutionary work is distinguished by the way the various parts are held in balance by their own weight. As the name suggests, the sculpture's ton of lead is merely 'propped up', like a house of cards. The base becomes redundant, there is no need for fixed supports, struts or even soldering. The work is the product of its own internal play of forces, and the gravity that animates it and holds it in place. With this work, Serra rose triumphantly to the challenge of an art that presents the viewer with nothing but its own force and balance, an art that creates its own space.

From the 1970s onwards, Richard Serra has used steel as his medium of choice, with a very specific aim: 'I use to steel to organise space.' Having worked in a steel foundry himself, to finance his studies in English at the University of California (Santa Barbara) and his art studies at Yale, Serra has developed a particular sensitivity to steel, since the outset of his career. Drawing on state-of-the-art techniques in engineering and architecture, Serra soon began creating immense sculptures with a striking double characteristic: first, their ability to integrate the visitor into the very core of the work, and second, their avoidance of any single, all-encompassing viewpoint. The viewer is invited to move within the work itself, while at the same time rethinking his relationship to the surrounding space, which is radically altered as a result. These disconcerting sculptures feature sinuous curves or vertical, angular forms. Often, the sheets of steel are slightly inclined, heightening our sense of danger and contributing to the works' dizzying, vertiginous quality. Each of Serra's works is designed for a specific site, creating its own space and inviting the viewer to move around and explore in new ways, adapting bodily to this altered environment, finding new directions, new perspectives. In this way, the viewer becomes the very subject of the work, its principal actor.

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