Richard Serra’s Verb List: Process as Sculpture
On his birthday, the gallery celebrates the late artist's foundational 1967 manifesto, a series of verbs that became the conceptual bedrock of his monumental steel practice.
AI-assisted voice playback. Starts only when you choose Play.
Richard Serra approached sculpture not as form but as action. His Verb List, compiled in 1967, reads like a sculptor’s declaration of intent: to cut, to fold, to roll, to crease, to grind, to plane, to carve, to bend, to twist. Each verb became a condition, a way of thinking through material and space that would define five decades of practice. The list was not a checklist but a logic, a method for working with the unexpected, for letting gravity and weight and the body’s own encounter with scale become the work itself.
Serra understood that a sculpture need not announce itself through beauty or symmetry. Instead, it could exist as the trace of an action, the residue of a verb enacted in lead, in steel, in rubber, in the space between a gallery’s walls. When he lifted a steel plate, when he threw molten rubber into a corner, when he balanced massive slabs against their own weight, the process remained visible. The viewer could read the gesture in the object, could sense the artist’s hand and decision in every tilt and lean.
The earliest works shown here embody that philosophy with particular clarity. To Lift, from 1967, is exactly what its title claims: a plate raised from the ground, its weight suspended in a moment of deliberation. Bullet, cast in lead the following year, is compact, dense, the result of gravity’s undeniable pull. By Strike: To Roberta and Rudy, a work that occupied Serra from 1969 to 1971, the verb had become monumental, a slab of steel bisecting space with the force of a gesture arrested in time.
Later, as Serra’s practice expanded across decades and continents, the Verb List remained his compass. When he installed Te Tuhirangi Contour in New Zealand between 2000 and 2002, he was still following that logic established in 1967: working with the landscape’s slope, with the horizon’s pull, with the weight of earth and steel in conversation. The verb here was to contour, to trace, to respond.
Serra died in 2024, but the Verb List endures as the key to his legacy. It reveals sculpture not as an object to be admired from a distance but as a thought made physical, a series of decisions rendered in materials that refuse to disappear. In his work, the process of making was never hidden; it was always, entirely, the point.
Imagery courtesy of David Zwirner (@davidzwirner).
