The works that make up Richard Serra’s current show at David Zwirner reveal an approachability that’s surprising for a figure commonly associated with aggressive, even overwhelming, effects. The sculptures and drawings on display, all produced in the last two years, work according to a human sense of scale, and propose immediate relationships between the visitor and the exhibition space. Although they don’t dominate their environment the way many of Serra’s projects do, these recent offerings sacrifice little of the artist’s usual intensity. Instead, they condense and distill it.
The first floor of Zwirner’s exhibition is given over entirely to two works in forged steel. The process of forging metal—as opposed to casting or rolling it, both techniques Serra has used regularly—involves exerting intense pressure from all sides, and is best used to produce solid, compact forms. Appropriately, since he adopted this method in the late 1970s, Serra’s work in forged steel has focused on elementary geometric volumes like the cylinders and cubes that make up Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure (2017) in Zwirner’s main gallery, and Into and Across (2017) down the hall. Unlike the expansively curved sheets of steel that Serra has used for various immersive site-specific installations, the simple forms of his forged sculptures can be comfortably circumambulated or visually understood at a glance.