Torqued Ellipses

There's no gestalt reading. You don't know the form even if you walk around it several times. When you walk inside the piece, you become caught up in the movement of the surface and your movement in relation to its movement.

Richard Serra on Torqued Ellipses

Richard Serra is one of those giants of 20th Century art, whose work I'm embarrassed to admit, I've only experienced in slides and text books. I know about him through readings in art theory and case studies (Tilted Arc in the Federal Plaza). In my mind, he had devolved into the one-sentence you can use to quickly categorize a lot of artists (in his case, he was the white guy that did big steel sheets that pissed people off). But on a day trip to the Dia Beacon today, I had a chance to walk through Torqued Ellipses, one of his more notable works.

Incredible.

To move through them and feel the movement in and out of structures so stable and solid while you weave through yourself them was almost a spiritual experience. Light sneaks in creating a dramatic effect. The warm rust colors against the limited lighting reminded of how Mark Rothko had wanted his paintings to be a spiritual experience exhibited only in low light (one of his last projects was a chapel). The surfaces are incredibly painterly in their texture and colors. Even if they were flat they still would be beautiful. And apparently, just building the shit was an engineering feat in and of itself.

Wow, hell of an experience. Richard Serra, in my book, is now the white guy that does really cool big steel sheets that piss people off.