Zane Bennett Contemporary Art is pleased to feature Richard Serra’s Carnegie (1987) as part of our exhibition spotlighting works produced by the Los Angeles-based print publisher Gemini G.E.L. Measuring eighty inches in both height and width, Carnegie is a monumental work whose dense, heavily textured surface challenges the stereotypically perceived flatness of printmaking.
Serra began experimenting with screenprinting 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, worked in long strokes across the screen. Repeated applications accumulate into a dense surface that retains the texture of the silkscreen mesh. The author of Richard Serra: Prints, Catalogue Raisonné, 1972–1999, Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe, describes the effect as an “astonishing structuring of the layers of black.”
RICHARD SERRA | (Detail) Carnegie, 1987. Screenprint and Paintstik, 80 x 80 in (203.2 x 203.2 cm)
Because the Paintstik was physically applied during printing, slight variations occur between impressions. Different working steps could even be required from one impression to another to achieve Serra’s desired result. As such, works produced through this process have been described 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 its edges. Black does not simply describe the form. Through the physical accretion of material, it 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.
The print shares its name with a monumental sculpture Serra created two years earlier for the 1985 Carnegie International. Permanently installed outside the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Carnegie (1985) consists of four slabs of Corten steel, each forty feet tall that taper from 12 feet to 9 feet 6 inches, and assembled into an irregular, roughly trapezoidal structure weighing approximately 200,000 pounds. Serra received the Carnegie Prize for the work alongside Anselm Kiefer, who was recognized for the painting Midgard.
RICHARD SERRA | (Detail) Carnegie, 1987. Screenprint and Paintstik, 80 x 80 in (203.2 x 203.2 cm)
The Carnegie sculpture was conceived specifically in response to its location. As the Carnegie Museum of Art has noted, it was intended to respond “in its mass and gravity” to the architecture of the museum itself. That the work is made of steel, historically a major part of the local economy in Pittsburgh, made for added resonance. The museum's curator John Caldwell noted in 1985 that the material "gives [local] people an entry, an emotional framework that they can work from." From outside, its 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.
The composition of the 1987 print echoes the sculpture without directly representing it. Instead, Serra seems to have translated a foundational element of the sculpture’s spatial logic into two dimensions. Like the sculpture, the print presents an irregular silhouette whose immense dark form is defined partly through its relationship to the marginal space around it. Corten steel has become accumulated black pigment; architectural space has become the exposed paper around the image.
This relationship between Serra’s sculpture and printmaking was not one of straightforward reproduction. Although some of his prints developed in relation to sculptures, the catalogue raisonné emphasizes that 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.
Serra described this process more personally in an interview with curator Mark Rosenthal. To return to a completed sculpture through drawing, he explained, was a means of seeing the work again and attempting “to distill it into another language.” Prints and drawings allowed him “to recall, to remember, and to condense” his involvement with a work while learning something new through their making.
Serra had worked in printmaking since 1972, experimenting with lithography, intaglio, and screenprinting throughout his career. Far from being secondary to his sculpture, his graphic work represented what the catalogue raisonné describes as “an essential component of his creative activity.” The physicality of his later screenprinting techniques allowed him to pursue many of the same fundamental concerns that defined his sculpture through an entirely different set of materials.
RICHARD SERRA | (Detail) Carnegie, 1987. Screenprint and Paintstik, 80 x 80 in (203.2 x 203.2 cm)
Carnegie is a particularly powerful example. The sculpture surrounds the body; the print confronts it. The sculpture derives its extraordinary presence from towering plates of industrial steel, while the print builds its mass through built layers of black pigment. In both, Serra makes the viewer acutely conscious of the relationship between a massive form and the space it occupies. Rather than functioning as an illustration of the sculpture, Carnegie can therefore be understood as its distillation. Serra removed the steel, architecture, and physical enclosure of the original work while preserving something of its weight, mass, materiality, and relationship to surrounding space. Through the unusual process by which it was printed, those qualities become physical properties of the print itself.
Impressions of the work are held in major public collections, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
For information about this impression of Richard Serra’s Carnegie, or to inquire about other works by Richard Serra available through Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, please contact the gallery at info@zanebennettgallery.com.
RICHARD SERRA | (Detail) Carnegie, 1987. Screenprint and Paintstik, 80 x 80 in (203.2 x 203.2 cm)
Photography by Marylene Mey © 1987 Richard Serra and Gemini G.E.L. LLC
