Carreras
Mugica

For its 4th edition, from October 21 to 26, OFFSCREEN Paris will take over a new venue: La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, with a selection of avant-garde, historical, and contemporary artists, working with installations and experimental practices around image-based work.

THE ARTIST

Richard Serra (1938-2024, USA)

Three Angles Prop (1969)

Three Angles Prop consists of three slightly bent forged steel plates stacked on top of each other in perfect balance but with a subtle difference in position and size. One of Serra’s first works with plates, like the other works in the artist’s Prop series, it shows the challenge of resolving the dilemma of how a work can, in apparent precarious balance, support itself by its own weight. The work was exhibited in the canonical exhibition Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form curated by Harald Szeemann at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969.

The artist said of his practice: “Obsession is what it comes down to. It is difficult to think without obsession, and it is impossible to create something without a foundation that is rigorous, incontrovertible, and, in fact, to some degree repetitive. Repetition is the ritual of obsession. Repetition is a way to jumpstart the indecision of beginning. To persevere and to begin over and over again is to continue the obsession with work. Work comes out of work. In order to work you must already be working.”

Television Delivers People (1973)

This short film, produced with Carlota Schoolman, focuses on the political importance of broadcasting as a corporate monopoly, and imperialism of the airwaves. Over cheery muzak, sentences in simple typography outline the role of television in delivering people to advertisers and critiques mass media. The artist bought airtime to broadcast the work to the public in 1973.

Richard Serra is well known for his large-scale sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings. Serra’s sculptures are notable for their material quality and exploration of the relationship between the viewer, the work, and the site. From the mid-1960s, Serra worked to radicalize and extend the definition of sculpture beginning with his early experiments with rubber, neon, and lead to his large-scale steel works.

Selected solo exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York (1986, 2007); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (1983–84); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (1977–78) and many others. Selected group exhibitions include Documenta, Kassel, Germany (1972, 1977, 1982, 1987); Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (1980, 1984, 2001, 2013); and Whitney Biennial, New York, USA (1968, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1995, 2006). His works are held in collections including Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; and Dia Art Foundation, New York, USA.