Exhibit of the week: Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Through Aug. 28

Leave your reading glasses at home, said Maika Pollack in The New York Observer. Unlike typical drawing exhibitions, the Met’s “illuminating encounter” with the “Mick Jagger of American sculpture” is as big, bold, and visceral as the 50-ton steel constructions Richard Serra is famous for. His preferred drawing medium is the black paintstick—an “oil-based, oversize crayon” that’s far better suited to dramatic gesture than to a miniaturist’s precision. Take, for example, Triangle, a 6-foot-tall triangle affixed to the wall. “It’s solid black, sculptural, smearily gestalt. The drawing is not about how your eye sees line, but how your body reacts to its massive shape.” The physical relationship between work and viewer remains a key dynamic throughout the show. “It’s like meditation: You start to notice how you stand on the balls of your feet, the way certain things attract you or repel you.”

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You may also lose your bearings, said Leah Ollman in the Los Angeles Times. Serra’s favorite trick is to toy with space: His drawings are often “force fields, black holes, and dense, imposing walls of darkness that register in both brain and gut.” One such work consists of two broad black panels, hung on adjoining walls, that meet in a corner. The corner “carries an inescapable charge” when you step into it; the piece “recalibrates the architecture” of the room. Here and elsewhere, the drawings “double as walls, ambiguous architectural planes that assert a presence as much as they suggest self-swallowing voids.” Serra’s handling of the paintstick is equally unorthodox. Once he bored of simply drawing with it, he took to melting several down into larger bricks, pressing them through wire screens, even tossing paintstick into a meat grinder “to enhance its graininess.”

Serra’s genre-busting doesn’t always pay off, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Without steel’s materiality or its endless capacity for manipulating a viewer’s sense of space, the artist’s work can seem “at once meager and histrionic.” This show’s audio guide will counsel you that Taraval Beach, a paintstick drawing that stretches from floor to ceiling, “references the wall, floor, and ceiling.” Yes, and…? More recent drawings, of turbulent black planet-like spheres, seem at once “furious” and unintentionally comic. The Met has never mounted a show as “genuinely radical” as this one, and its galleries aren’t well suited to the challenges. But in embracing Serra’s difficult work, the museum may have entered a new era. “Anything could happen now.”