Serra supervises delicate operation

One of four slabs is lifted into Sculpture Garden

Serra gets down low to carefully inspect installation

Serra examines the final product

Artist Richard Serra Prepares for Mammoth Retrospective at MoMA

On Saturday, April 14, the Museum of Modern Art blocked off 54th St. between Fifth and Sixth Aves. in order to install a monumental work by renowned artist Richard Serra in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. Part of “Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years,” a career retrospective opening June 3 that looks back at Serra’s influential output -- as well as forward with three new works -- the four-piece, free-standing “Intersection II” (1992-93), consisting of four nearly identical conical sections of weatherproof steel, was lifted by crane into the Sculpture Garden, where it joined the already-in-place “Torqued Ellipse IV.”

More than 13 feet high and nearly 53 feet long and 2 1/8 inches thick, each section was forged in Germany and then shipped to the United States by boat. The pieces were first lined up on Sixth Ave., each on its own flatbed truck, before being carried one at a time into the Sculpture Garden, carefully brought over the wall and slowly dropped into their precisely measured places. The delicate operation, which took almost six hours, was overseen by Serra, who watched closely as the clamps were applied to each 30-ton slab; he then walked in and around the sections, inspecting the installation, T-square in hand, as they reached the marble pavement of the Sculpture Garden.

“Sometimes I think I’d like to do it every day of my life,” Serra told TimesSquare.com, “and other times I think that as exciting and as anxiety-ridden as it is . . . it’s not the kind of job where you can say, ‘Look, I want to take a break.’ You have to really keep on top of it all the time. Everybody has to keep on top of it all the time.”


Log on now to www.flickr.com/photos/twi-ny for an exclusive, detailed photo essay on the fascinating process of installing “Intersection II,” featuring dozens of candid shots of Serra supervising the activity.

All contents copyright 2007 by Mark Rifkin and twi-ny. All rights reserved. Contents may not be reprinted without written permission. For more on what’s going on this week in New York, visit www.twi-ny.com.

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