Richard Serra Quotes

The peculiarity of sculpture is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space. Painting may strive to give on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space, but it is space itself as a perceived quantity that becomes the peculiar concern of the sculptor. We may say that for the painter space is a luxury; for the sculptor it is a necessity.

What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.

Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

I had no intentions of going into sculpture but found that sculpture was just an extension of drawing.

I was never good at painting. The great turning point came when I had a block of wood and I carved a shape into the wood and put a small piece of timber into that space - like a negative - and so it made an endless column, only inward.

Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself.

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

From time to time, I've experimented with sculpture or metal design. It's a good break from just sitting behind the keyboard.

I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It's about space and form and it's something you can share with other people.

A chair, it's like a sculpture. It starts as a thought and then becomes an idea, something I might think about for years. When the time is right, I express it on paper, usually as a simple line in space. Finally, it takes shape.

I think size is the most unused quotient in the sculptor's repertoire because it requires lots of commitment and time. To me it's the best tool. With size you get space and atmosphere: atmosphere becomes volume. You stand in the shape, in the zone.

My mom is a sculptress.

A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

Realizing this, I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition.

I look at every piece of furniture and every object as an individual sculpture.

Light is architectural. It is sculptural.

Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.

I used to sculpt a bit as a kid.

I went to a quite macho art school in the 1970s, and while everyone was making hulking big sculptures, I was making things out of bits of paper.

Sometimes in a sculpture, it's interesting to me what's stylized and what's natural and how those forms interrelate, as they interrelate in ourselves.

It's probably what I'm most interested in as a choreographer: how I can alter and shift and develop the structure of a piece and of the space.

Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater To raise the dead to life than to create Phantoms that seem to live.