Richard Serra: Weight & Measure Drawings

Weight and Measure Drawings, which premiered at The Drawing Center before traveling the country to other venues, consisted of eight large-scale drawings (with heights ranging from 10-13 feet), oil stick on hiromi paper. For each presentation of the exhibition, Richard Serra (1938-2024) determined the placement of the drawings by the architectural context, endowing the typically fragile medium of drawing with an almost geological heft. Integral to his decisions regarding the arrangement of the drawings were the intentionality of the space and its expression architecturally. Through the placement of the drawings, Serra addressed the concept "weight," making visible the volume of the space and increasing the awareness of the space as a whole. Likewise, "measure" was considered as a concept integrally tied to subjective experience. As Serra remarked: "Measurement is a process that allows (me) to locate (myself) in the space, to understand it in terms of physical movement." (From Nicholas Serota and David Sylvester's interview with Serra in Weight and Measure 1992, Tate Gallery, London.)

The drawings presented at The Drawing Center were the companion works to an exhibition of sculpture, entitled Weight and Measure, 1992, created for the Tate Gallery, London. As Serra noted in an interview about the Tate Gallery exhibition, his intention was to create sculptures which had "weight and mass comparable to that of the architecture." At The Drawing Center and the successive venues, Serra explored a similar intervention of architectural space through the medium of drawing. As Serra remarked: "My initial engagement in art was through drawing, and drawing is still at the core of my work...Drawing is always an indication of how artists think. When I talk about drawing I don't mean drawing as a discipline different from that of painting and sculpture....Drawing defines how one collects material through scale, placement, and edge." (From Nicholas Serota and David Sylvester's interview with Serra.)