Richard Serra is a contemporary minimalist artist known for his monumental steel sculptures. Serra’s architectural curves, often overwhelming in scale, often cause dizziness and disorientation as viewers walk through its winding passages. Although he also makes paintings and prints, Serra’s exploration of the properties of unconventional materials, such as Splash (1968-1970), a series using molten lead, and Belts (1966-1967), sculptures of vulcanized rubber, gradually increased the scale of his work. Like Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, Serra’s attention to materiality has been the hallmark of his practice. “It was the first time I looked at sculpture seriously,” Serra said of visiting Constantin Brancusi’s studio in Paris. “I really responded to the strength, simplicity and abstraction of the work.” Born on November 2, 1938 in San Francisco, CA, the artist attended the University of California at Berkeley and graduated in 1961 with a degree in English literature. Serra went on to pursue his MFA at the Yale School of Art, where his classmates included Chuck Close, Brice Marden and Nancy Graves. Serra currently lives and works between New York, NY and Nova Scotia, Canada. His works are currently in the collections of the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Dia: Beacon in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery in London and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.