The abstract sculptor Richard Serra, who used massive sheets of steel to become an art-world giant known as the “poet of iron,” died of pneumonia at his home on Long Island at the age of 85, his attorney told The New York Times. Over the course of his long career, Serra was honored with two retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art. He is perhaps best known for a series of eight curved sculptures titled, “The Matter of Time,” installed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. A work called “Tilted Arc,” commissioned by the federal government and erected at Federal Plaza in Manhattan in the 1980s, sparked backlash—prompting Serra to file a lawsuit, which he lost. Born in San Francisco, Serra started out as a painter before turning to large-scale sculpting, inspired by trips to the shipyard with his pipe-fitter father as a child and his own work in steel mills. “Space is my subject,” he once explained.
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