Gagosian Gallery, New York John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco Acquired from the above by the present owner
Catalogue Essay
Executed in 2007, Track 31 exemplifies the minimal yet richly surfaced monochromatic drawings which have come to define Richard Serra’s iconoclastic oeuvre. Although the artist is best known for his large-scale metal sculptural works, Serra’s drawings constitute an essential component of his practice, expressing the mass and volume of space in literal form through the visual record of the black paintstick. With graphic intensity, Track 31 reflects the artist’s dynamic understanding of spatial perception and affirms its physical relationship with the world.
Serra has worked with paintstick since the early 1970s, when he began to create his monumental series of Installation Drawings in an investigation of process and site-specificity. Since this period, his drawings have evolved through several different phases before developing into the Solids series, to which Track 31 belongs. Track 31’s dense, grainy surface is the result of a long and extremely physical process of working the surface, in which Serra first spreads a sheet of handmade paper on top of a heated block of paintstick before pressing it into the paper using a steel block and the weight of his own body. As Neil Cox describes, chance is paramount to each drawing: “The process depends on achieving even pressure across the surface, sensing the marking, through the movement of the hand, through embodied memory and visual tracking over the blank white sheet… Once the process is felt to have reached its end—then and only then is the paper lifted from its bed of black matter” (Neil Cox, “The Shape of Feeling, in Richard Serra: Drawings 2015-2017, exh. cat., Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2017, pp. 12-13). Allowing his method of work to define intention, Serra’s drawings mirror the formation of volume that becomes physically realized in his acclaimed sculptures. Bristling with textural palpability, Track 31 mediates the spectator’s perception of its surroundings by redefining and articulating space and time.
Property from the Private Collection of William Harris Smith, Chicago