There's always more than meets the eye in Richard Serra's monumental steel sculpture -- as visitors will see Feb. 16, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opens the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, bankrolled by financier and collector Eli Broad.
Two of Serra's 2006 works, which debuted at his recent 40-year retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, command the entire ground floor of the new building, designed by architect Renzo Piano. Wrap-around environments that are impossible to see in their entirety from a single vantage point, they are expected to remain in place for about a year.
"Band," a 183-ton ribbon of weatherproof steel that stands almost 13 feet tall and undulates through a "footprint" of about 70 by 37 feet, occupies the east gallery. A new addition to LACMA's collection, it was purchased for an undisclosed sum from a $10-million acquisitions fund established by Broad. (His own enormous personal collection will remain under the control of his Foundation, he let it be known last week.) "Sequence," a sculpture of roughly the same size and composed of two twisted elliptical structures encircled by a serpentine passageway, is in the west gallery. Lent by Serra, it's destined for a museum that Gap founder Donald Fisher plans to build for his collection in San Francisco.
Several years in the making, the sculptures are wonders of design and engineering. Although Serra, 68, has been exhibiting "Torqued Ellipses," massive steel enclosures with curved and slanted walls, for a decade, it isn't easy to imagine how he dreamed up these two works in his New York studio or how they were made in Germany and transported here.
The installation alone -- finessed while the building was under construction -- was a highly synchronized, 10-day effort by a trusted crew that works 12-hour days. Each work consists of enormous panels that must be aligned within a 32nd of an inch.
Precision, planning and overcoming obstacles, such as doorways and uneven floors -- Serra and his team have all that down to a science. But it's not what excites him.
"It's just part of what I do," Serra says, walking around "Band" just after its installation. "I'm interested when the pieces are set up. I would just as soon that the process evaporates and you have to deal with the experience of the work."
For museum visitors, that's inevitable. These are sculptures that reach out and envelop all who enter, but they don't reveal all their secrets. Elusiveness is as essential to the art as an imposing physical presence.
