Richard Serra Quotes

If you look at sculptures from hundreds of years ago, everyone's naked. It's not a bad thing.

One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it's five, or thirty seconds and it's just a different bed for activities there.

I think the human body is beautiful, and I don't really have a huge problem in dealing with it, but it's the context, the environment and what I feel about it that that makes the difference for me.

I let the audience use their imaginations. Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?

For me, until I know that the audience really gets what I'm trying to communicate I'm not done.

To understand something, whether we are aware of it or not, depends on choosing a model. We get to understand what we see by comparing it with something else, something that we think we understand better. But what we compare it with turns out to have a huge influence on the outcome.

It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

You wouldn't ask Rodin to make an ugly sculpture, or me to make a film with an ugly woman.

There's something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience.

I want the pictures to be working in both directions. I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience.

When we make the show, we are always talking about how the show is really in between what we make and what the viewer thinks of it.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing; people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.

The aim of the sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor; the aim of the orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator.

Driving a steamroller over an old trumpet or a teaspoon is no more destructive than taking a chisel to a lump of marble already torn from the landscape. But people don't see it that way because marble is considered noble.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.

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.

The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.

If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman, I know I am making art.

Every perception of color is an illusion, we do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.

In my sculpture, it's not an image I am seeking, it's not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about.

I consider space to be a material. The articulation of space has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct.