Qatar Museums initiated Richard Serra’s largest ever permanent installations and his first exhibitions in the Middle East
2011, 2014
In 2011 and 2014, Qatar Museums commissioned Richard Serra to create permanent, site-specific public sculptures in Qatar. 7 and East-West/West-East are the artist's largest works to date.
7,a sculpture composed of seven steel plates, was erected in 2011 on a pier extending out from the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) Park in Doha, adjacent to the Museum of Islamic Art designed by I.M. Pei. The plates, each of which is 78 feet high and eight feet wide, are arranged in a heptagonal configuration. 7 is Serra's tallest sculpture to date, and his first public work in the Middle East.
In 2014, a second major commission resulted in the permanent installation of a line of four vertical steel plates (two plates measure 55 and two 48 feet high, while all four are 13 feet wide) in The Brouq Nature Reserve in the Zekreet Desert outside Doha in Qatar. East-West/West-East extends over roughly half a mile—the largest area of any work by Serra. “East-West/West-East towers with the grandeur of Stonehenge or the ruins of a classical city,” wrote Hyperallergic, “and more than any work of Serra’s I’ve ever encountered it establishes an organic relationship to its surroundings, the steel plates as much a reference to the earth’s elemental forces and materials as they are to human industry.”
Also in 2014, Qatar Museums organized two concurrent presentations of Serra’s work in Doha, marking his first exhibitions in the Middle East. At the QMA Gallery in the Katara cultural village, a retrospective exhibition included One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969), The Consequence of Consequence (2011), Double Torqued Ellipse (1999), and works on paper from 2013. A new work titled Passage of Time occupied the entirety of theAl Riwaq exhibition space. "In addition to the permanent pieces,” Hyperallergic observed, “two gallery shows allow viewers to take in the full sweep of Serra’s four-plus decades as one of America’s—and the world’s—foremost sculptors."
The publication Richard Serra accompanied the two permanent installations and the exhibitions in Qatar. Published by Steidl
Read more: an interview with the artist inThe New Yorker about East-West/West-East, and a profile in The Wall Street Journal Magazine featuring the public installations in Qatar.