MONUMENTA is an essential date in the contemporary art calendar. Each year, MONUMENTA invites a leading artist to engage with the monumental nave of the Grand Palais through the creation of a series of new works. After Anselm Kiefer in 2007, Richard Serra takes up the MONUMENTA challenge, from May 7 to June 15, 2008.

Photo MCC - Farida Bréchemier
Richard Serra and the montage of Promenade, Apr. 2008

Richard Serra is a major artist of our time. For over 30 years he has been one of the leading exponents of modern American sculpture. His monumental steel sculptures express a uniquely minimalist approach, with a raw tension highlighting their production processes and the dialogue between the work and its environment. Working with industrial materials and highly complex engineering techniques, Serra’s installations embody a plastic approach that pushes the powerful physical and material characteristics of the works to their utmost extremes.

Richard Serra’s often enormous sculptures are quite literally ‘experienced’ by the visitor, who penetrates and moves through and around them, disrupting his relationship to the surrounding space with often dizzying results. Ellipses, curves, voluptuous twists, soaring verticals and aerial vanishing points are among the forms explored by Richard Serra in his work, through the use of innovative, spectacular perspectives.

In the nave of the Grand Palais, Richard Serra disrupts our relationship to the architectural setting and offers a unique experience designed to challenge our perception of balance and gravity. Visitors experience Richard Serra’s installation for MONUMENTA 2008 – evocatively entitled Promenade – as a radical, poetic landscape of steel, minimalist yet full of movement. An alarming confrontation with the space of the Grand Palais, guaranteed to move and disturb.

http://www.monumenta.com/2008/

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