Richard Serra

He is one of the most distinguished sculptors of the twentieth century, Richard Serra was acclaimed for a long time for his artworks in corten steel, with a particularly ambitious and international character. His work emphasizes materiality and relationship with the observer, the site of the work and the work itself.

Originally from S. Francesco, Richard Serra grew up visiting the factories of the Marina Cantieri where his father worked as a maintenance technician of the piping area. Serra talked a lot about the influence his father's career had on his art. Especially the balance coming from the fusion of steel, combined to create sculptures like the one in Corten in Liverpool street, London, called Fulcrum.

Serra comes from a completely American education, having studied at the University of California at Berkeley. He also worked briefly in a East Bay steel mills to pay his studies in school. The artist can claim to belong and be among the founders of the current, defined"minimalist", born in the '60s by a generation of American revolutionary artists. Those sculptors began an unconventional approach to industrial materials, such as stainless steel and Cor-ten which until then had been imagined as structural steels. Over the years, Serra has also focused more on large-scale sculptures, through works that embrace urban architecture or landscape design. Serra, like the minimalist artists of his period, plays with Corten steel and its specific weight, notoriously high, which, after the actionof modeling of his art, takes on interesting gravitational contrasts.

 

Donald Judd

Donald Judd, widely known as one of the most significant post-war American artists, is considered, perhaps, the most famous in the field of large-scale steel installations in the United States, such as his work in Marfa, Texas.

His work was able to define what is precisely the Minimalist movement, a label whose origins have often been discussed. Donald Judd with his installations and sculptures helped us a lot to understand it, with the use of industrial materials such as plexiglass, concrete and Corten steel. His compositions often refer to classical geometric forms, in a sort of attempt to exalt the shape of the object itself, more than any symbolic meaning hidden within the work.

Bernett Newmann

Born in New York in 1905, Newmann represents a kind of expressionist artist typical of the beginning of the century, unconventional and American to the bones, completely detached, for the first time in history, from any previous European artistic canon. In one of his interviews, he expresses, infact, mainly this concept: "... We are freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, melancholy, legend, myth or possessions that have been instruments of Western art ...".

Barnett Newman makes several works in Corten steel during his career, the most famous, the Broken Obelisk, is certainly one of the most enigmatic.

About 25 feet high, with 6000 pounds of weight, this inverted obelisk, created between 1963 and 1967, in the full minimalist phase of Newman and whose burnished Corten steel color is unmistakable, stands in an apparently precarious way, thanks to an Egyptian pyramid at the base, another emblematic Egyptian form.

Newman's minimalism and philosophy take shape completely in this Corten steel work, with its historical significance, as well as its destination, designed for no particular meaning or specific site.