Richard Serra (San Francisco, USA, 1938 – Orient, New York, 2024) redefined sculpture as an experience of space rather than an object placed within it, using steel, lead, and rubber to make gravity and instability physically legible to a viewer's own body.

Serra traced his interest in industrial material to watching a tanker launch at the San Francisco shipyard where his father worked as a pipe fitter, and studied at UC Berkeley and Santa Barbara before completing a BFA and MFA in painting and printmaking at Yale. Settling in New York in 1966, he began treating sculpture as a record of action rather than composition: his 1967–68 Verb List, a handwritten inventory of transitive verbs (to roll, to fold, to splash, to prop), became instructions he tested directly on materials that could register each action's trace. To Lift (1967) raised a sheet of rubber off the floor using nothing but its own tension; Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up, made with the composer Philip Glass, then his studio assistant, did exactly what its title says; and in Splashing and Casting, Serra flung molten lead into the seam between wall and floor, then pried the hardened metal free.