The Matter of Time: Richard Serra Solved the One Room Frank Gehry’s Building Could Never Fill

ART & CULTURE · BILBAO

Reading time: 8 min

Richard Serra died on 26 March 2024, at 85, at his home in Orient, New York. The Matter of Time, his permanent installation at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, is unaffected by that fact in any physical sense: the steel has not moved. What has changed is what the room now represents, the largest single concentration of his work anywhere, filling a gallery that had defeated every other attempt to use it.

---

The Matter of Time occupies the Arcelor Gallery on the ground floor of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, an uninterrupted 430 by 80 foot expanse beneath an 80 foot ceiling that Frank Gehry built into the museum’s original 1997 design. Eight sculptures, weighing 1,034 tonnes of weathering steel between them, fill the space with curling, torqued walls that visitors walk between, through and around, the geometry shifting from disorientating to expansive and back again over the course of a single room.

Richard Serra died on 26 March 2024, from pneumonia, at his home in Orient, New York. He was 85. The installation in Bilbao does not change because of that. It was already permanent, already finished, already the largest realisation anywhere of ideas Serra had spent four decades developing. What his death does change is how the room reads to anyone standing in it now: not as an active artist’s most ambitious ongoing commission, but as the largest complete statement a now-finished body of work ever made.

A room nobody could use, until one artist matched its scale

The Arcelor Gallery was not built for Richard Serra. It was built by Gehry, as part of the museum’s original architecture, and it very nearly defeated the point of having a museum at all. A ground floor space running 430 feet long and 80 feet high, positioned directly off the main lobby, is not a room that accommodates conventional exhibition making. Most artwork, hung or placed at human scale, simply disappears inside it.

The museum’s first attempt to occupy the space came with its own opening in 1997, when Serra was commissioned to make Snake, a single sculpture placed in the gallery to mark the building’s debut. It worked well enough that when the museum staged a full Serra retrospective in 1999, adding eight Torqued Ellipse sculptures to the space, the results convinced the museum’s directors that Serra was the one artist capable of solving the room permanently rather than temporarily. They asked him to devise a permanent installation for the gallery. He spent the next six years doing it. The result, unveiled in June 2005 under the title The Matter of Time, was built from seven new works alongside the original Snake, at a reported cost of fifteen million euros for materials and fabrication alone. The gallery was later renamed the Arcelor Gallery after the steel company that sponsored the completed installation; it had opened eight years earlier known simply as the Fish Gallery, a working title that says as much about how hard the space was to use as anything written about it since.

Serra’s solution was not to compete with the room’s excessive scale. It was to match it. Eighty foot ceilings and a 430 foot floor plan stop being a design failure the moment the sculpture inside them is built from steel walls fourteen feet tall, curling and torquing across the full length of the gallery. The room’s problem became the installation’s material.

What the eight sculptures actually do

The sculptures, encountered in the order visitors move through them, are Torqued Spiral (Closed Open Closed Open Closed) (2003 to 2004), Torqued Ellipse (2003 to 2004), Double Torqued Ellipse (2003 to 2004), Snake (1994 to 1997, the earliest work, made for the museum’s opening), Torqued Spiral (Right Left) (2003 to 2004), Torqued Spiral (Open Left Closed Right) (2003 to 2004), Between the Torus and the Sphere (2003 to 2005), and Blind Spot Reversed (2003 to 2005). Each was fabricated from weathering steel, commonly known as COR-TEN, at a rolling mill in Siegen, Germany, and assembled from sheets spot-welded together into single curling walls.

The torqued geometry that gives most of the works their name is a specific, describable thing rather than a loose descriptive term. A torqued form is one that twists as it rises: the same steel wall leans in one direction at floor level and the opposite direction at its top edge, the way the inner wall of a spiral staircase leans one way at the bottom of a turn and the other way near the top. Walking alongside one, the passage between the wall and its neighbour narrows and widens unpredictably, and the ceiling appears to tilt even though it has not moved. Walking inside one of the ellipses or spirals produces the opposite effect, an interior that opens out unexpectedly once the entrance has closed behind you. The sequence of eight works alternates between these two experiences, corridor and chamber, compression and release, across the full length of the gallery.

None of this is achieved through complexity of form. Every wall in every sculpture is a single continuous curved plane. The disorientation comes entirely from scale, from steel behaving in a way a visitor’s body expects only flexible material to behave, and from the accumulated weight, over a tonne of steel for every one of the room’s 430 feet of length, doing all of that leaning and curling silently, at rest.

Weathering steel was not a decorative choice. Left unpainted, COR-TEN develops a stable oxide layer at its surface within a few years of exposure, a controlled rust skin that then protects the metal underneath from further corrosion rather than continuing to eat into it. A permanent installation built to last decades inside a museum with no intention of repainting or resealing eight sculptures every few years needed a material that finished corroding itself on its own terms and then stopped. The rust-red colour visitors see today is not weathering damage. It is the material doing exactly what it was specified to do.

The man who almost became a painter

Serra was born in San Francisco on 2 November 1938, the second of three sons. His father, Tony, had emigrated from Mallorca and worked as a pipefitter at a local shipyard before later becoming a candy plant foreman. His mother, Gladys, was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants from Odessa. Serra later described a specific memory from age four, watching a ship launch at the yard where his father worked, as containing, in his own words, all the raw material he ever needed as an artist.

He began at the University of California, Berkeley, studying English literature, then transferred to UC Santa Barbara, graduating with a literature degree in 1961. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty five, he worked in steel mills to pay for his education, which makes the material he would spend the rest of his career shaping a genuinely literal inheritance rather than a metaphor. At Yale, where he earned a further degree in art history alongside an MFA in 1964, his contemporaries included Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Robert Mangold and the sculptor Nancy Graves, whom he later married. He studied and made paintings at Yale, and taught a course in colour theory in his final year there.

A Yale travelling fellowship took him to Paris in 1964, where he befriended the composer Philip Glass and worked for a period in Constantin Brancusi’s former studio. A Fulbright grant took him to Florence the following year. The turn away from painting happened in Madrid in 1966, in front of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas: Serra has said that seeing the painting convinced him he could not do anything more useful in paint, and that sculpture was where his attention belonged instead. His first solo exhibition, held that same period at Galleria Salita in Rome under the title Animal Habitats, was built from assemblages incorporating live and taxidermied animals, closer to the Arte Povera movement he had encountered in Italy than to anything resembling the steel installations that would eventually define him.

Robert Hughes’s verdict, and what stands after it

When The Matter of Time was unveiled in June 2005, the critic Robert Hughes reviewed it for The Guardian and called Serra the best sculptor alive, and the only great one at work anywhere in the early twenty first century. It was a claim made about a living artist with, at that point, another nineteen years of work still ahead of him.

Serra kept working steel at scale for those nineteen years, but Bilbao’s installation was never surpassed in scale within his own output; nothing else in his career gathered as much of his material, his tonnage and his specific geometric language into a single permanent room. What Hughes was responding to in 2005 is still standing in the Arcelor Gallery, unchanged, and it is now the largest available answer to the question of what Serra’s steel could do when a museum gave him an entire impossible room and eight years to solve it.

Final thoughts

Richard Serra died on 26 March 2024. The Matter of Time has not moved, and will not need to. It exists now the way it existed before his death, as a permanent installation inside a gallery that no other artist had managed to make work, built from a material Serra first encountered as a teenager earning his way through university rather than as an artistic choice made from a position of comfort. The room still does what it did in 2005: it takes a visitor’s sense of scale, weight and direction, and quietly takes it apart.