ProvenanceThe ArtistPaula Cooper Gallery, New YorkDaniel Weinberg Gallery, Los AngelesPrivate CollectionAnthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco and Schonewald Fine Arts, Dusseldorf Private Collection, New YorkvExhibitedBlum & Poe, New York, Dansaekhwa and Minimalism, April 14 - May 21, 2016.Andre Simoens Gallery, Knokke, Carl Andre, Yayoi Kusama and Richard Serra 'The context was the issue, not the stretcher,' August 4 - September 17, 2007.LiteratureJanssen, Hans, ed., Richard Serra: Drawings/Zeichnungen, 1969-1990, Catalogue Raisonné/Werkverzeichnis (Bern: Benteli, 1990), p. 231, no. 184.Richard Serra is widely considered to be among the most important living American artists. He was a central figure in the development of Process art in the 1960s, and has since gone on to make widely influential sculptures, prints, films, and drawings. In the mid-1960s he began experimenting with non-traditional materials such as molten lead. By the late 1960s he was producing his famous Prop series in which the sculptural components are held together by balance and the force of gravity. While primarily known for his monumental steel sculptures, Serra has worked in different media throughout his career and drawings are a significant and increasingly influential part of his oeuvre.Serra has continually invented new drawing techniques that, as much as his sculptures, reflect his interest in physicality and the process of art making. In the mid-1970s Serra began to melt black paintsticks –a wax and carbon based medium generally available as small, crayon-sized sticks— together into large bricks. Pressing this material onto the paper or canvas surface requires repetitive physical actions that engage the artist’s whole body. The resulting images reject and transform the line-based tradition of drawing in favor of weighty, solid forms whose built-up surface has a sculptural texture. In Untitled (1980-81) Serra leaves the upper corners of the paper support visible, a contrast that further emphasizes the impasto-like density of the work’s surface. In its investigation of materiality and physicality, Untitled infuses the two-dimensionality of drawing with sculptural form and exemplifies Serra’s revolutionary approach to the medium.Richard Serra was born in 1938 in San Francisco and studied at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Santa Barbara between 1957 and 1961. He completed his his BFA and MFA from Yale University between 1961 and 1964. After receiving a Yale traveling fellowship, Serra spent several years in Europe. His first solo exhibit was held at Galleria La Salita, Rome, in 1966. Upon returning to the United States he quickly became central to the New York art world of the late 1960s. Serra’s work has been widely exhibited: the subject of two retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art (1986 and 2007) as well as recent exhibits at the American Academy in Rome, Italy (2000); The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2003); Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2003, 2014); Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Italy (2004); Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2005); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Germany (2008). His works are included in most major collections of modern and contemporary art, and his drawings were the subject of a traveling retrospective exhibition organized by San Francisco MoMA and the Menil collection, Houston in 2011-2012.