Serra began experimenting with screen printing in the mid-1980s, developing an unusual process that allowed him to build up remarkably thick fields of black. Rather than simply pushing ink through a screen with a squeegee, Serra and his printers began with a conventional layer of black ink before applying subsequent layers using specially prepared oil-crayon, or Paintstik, with each layer worked in long strokes across the screen. Repeated applications accumulate into a dense surface that retains the texture of the silkscreen mesh. With the Paintstik manually applied, the slight variations among impressions have been referred to as “multiple monotypes.” They share the same composition, but each possesses subtle variations in surface and texture.

In "Carnegie," this process is fundamental to the image itself. A massive, irregular field of black occupies nearly the entire sheet, pressing outward against the edges. The physical accretion of material gives the form substance, weight, and depth. At nearly seven feet across, the print approaches an architectural scale, confronting the viewer less as an image and more as a hulking physical presence.

Similarly titled as the monumental sculpture Serra created two years earlier for the 1985 Carnegie International and permanently installed outside the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the print simulates the mass and gravity of the sculpture made with four slabs of Cor-Ten steel and assembled into an irregular, roughly trapezoidal structure weighing approximately 200,000 pounds. From outside, the towering steel planes either overlap or separate as the viewer moves around them. Entering the sculpture leads into a darkened interior chamber, enclosed by steel but open to a framed sky overhead.

Serra translated a foundational element of the sculpture’s spatial logic into two dimensions for the print, presenting an irregular silhouette whose immense form is defined through its relationship to the marginal space around it. Cor-Ten steel has become accumulated black pigment; architectural space, the exposed paper around the image.

Although some of his prints developed in relation to sculptures, they “must nonetheless be understood as an autonomous form of expression with independent possibilities in their formulation.” Serra was not interested in simply duplicating an object in another medium, but in exploring what that medium could do on its own terms. To return to a completed sculpture through drawing was a means of attempting “to distill it into another language.”

"Carnegie" is a powerful example. The sculpture surrounds the body; the print confronts it. The sculpture derives its presence from towering plates of steel, while the print builds its mass through layers of black pigment. In both, Serra makes the viewer acutely conscious of the relationship between a massive form and the space it occupies.