Richard Serra: Casablanca
8365 Melrose Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Gemini G.E.L. is pleased to present Casablanca, a series of six new works by Richard Serra. An opening reception will take place on November 19 from 3:30 to 6:30pm, and selections from the series will also be introduced at Art Basel Miami Beach, December 1-3, 2022.
For Casablanca, Serra continues his close collaboration with Gemini Master Printer Xavier Fumat and his team, creating highly textured editioned works made with a mixture of hand-applied oil stick, etching ink, and silica. Unsurprisingly, as Serra is known for pushing the limits of printmaking, the works are monumental: five of them are 5 feet in scale, and the sixth work is even larger, measuring 7-feet in width.
Serra began this project in early 2020, just prior to the 3-month Covid-19 shutdown of the Gemini workshop. With work being done intermittently in 2020, images were proofed and shipped back-and- forth to Serra in New York until the RTPs were achieved. Obtaining the necessary amounts of ink and paper required for the project, resulting from the pandemic supply-chain issues, presented its own challenges. Consequently, from start to finish, this project has taken nearly 3 years to complete.
Richard Serra (b. 1939, San Francisco California) is one the most significant artists of the 21st century. He has exhibited extensively in major museums and has created site-specific sculptures for both public and private venues across the world. Serra’s work has been the subject of two retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the first in 1986 and the second in 2007. Other major recent exhibitions include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (1999); American Academy in Rome, Italy (2000); Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2003, 2014); Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Italy (2004); “Richard Serra Drawings— Work Comes Out of Work,” Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008); “Promenade,” Monumenta, Grand Palais, Paris (2008); “Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011, traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; and The Menil were installed as part of the inaugural exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. East-West/West-East (2014) was permanently installed in the desert of the Brouq Nature Reserve in western Qatar in 2014. Serra has participated in dOCUMENTA in 1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987; and in the Biennale di Venezia in 1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013. In 2015, Serra was awarded Les Insignes de Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, France. Serra lives and works in New York and on the North Fork of Long Island.