Richard Serra American, 1938-2024

Featuring paintings, works on paper, sculpture, film, and archival ephemera from the SFMOMA Library, and SFAI archive, this ambitious exhibition showcases museum-quality works by contemporary and historical artists, illustrating Berggruen...

Exhibiting Artists:

Tauba Auerbach | John Baldessari | Larry Bell | Helen Berggruen | Sarah Blaustein | Katherine Boxall | Val Britton | Christopher Brown | Andy Burgess | Dean Byington | Bruce Cohen | Adriane Colburn | Travis Collinson | Mark di Suvero | June Edmonds | Charles Gaines | Daniel Gibson | Isca Greenfield-Sanders | Michael Gregory | Stephen Hannock | Sarah Hotchkiss | Seth Kaufman | Clare Kirkconnell | Matt Kleberg | Anna Kunz | Charles Lee | Barry McGee | Klea McKenna | Tom McKinley | Vanessa Marsh | Richard Misrach | Nicole Mueller | Ed Ruscha | Richard Serra | Jillian Shea | Stephanie H. Shih | Kyle Warren Smith | Joni Sternbach | Marie Thibeault | Dani Tull | Darren Waterston | Griff Williams | Jonas Wood | Christopher Woodcock

Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Works in Black & White, a group exhibition that delves into the world of black and white as the primary, and often sole, colors. This curated collection explores the nuances of these two fundamental tones, reflecting on the various ways artists employ simplicity and complexity within this timeless palette. From bold abstractions to intricate minimalism, the exhibition reveals the artists' diverse abilities to convey emotion and provoke contemplation within the grayscale spectrum.

Works in Black & White will be on display from September 14 — October 13, 2023, featured on the top level of Berggruen Gallery.

Exhibiting Artists:

Robert Bechtle | Richard Diebenkorn | Lucian Freud | Michael Gregory | Philip Guston | Mona Hatoum | Al Held | Sarah Hotchkiss | William Kentridge | Anselm Kiefer | Matt Kleberg | Des Lawrence | Julian Lethbridge | Brice Marden | Sam Messenger | Martin Puryear | Linda Ridgway | Iran Do Espírito Santo | Richard Serra | Joel Shapiro | Kiki Smith | Jonas Wood

John Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Four Decades: Drawings and Works on Paper, a group exhibition that invites a new perspective on a history of drawing and painting by integrating works from both well known and emerging artists. This exhibition will open on Thursday, May 1st, and will run through Saturday, June 28th. An opening reception will be held on May 1st, from 5:30-7:30 pm.

From Willem de Kooning’s playful oil jitney to Sam Messenger’s meticulously rendered “veils”, Four Decades: Drawings and Works on Paper jumps around the various inspirations of the artists included to present a group of works in a fresh context. This exhibition incorporates the work of monumental and historical artists such as Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Mark di Suvero, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Longo with dynamic new work from emerging artists such as Diana Al-Hadid and William Cordova, both New York City artists who have received major exhibitions in 2013.

Mid career artists such as Peter Doig, Spencer Finch and Julie Mehretu balance out this topographical collection of works; their inclusion points to the range of various surfaces and textures an artist can explore within the expanse of their career. Mehretu’s careful drawings and di Suvero’s ink tinkerings contrast in each artist’s interpretation of an architectural perspectivism. Roxy Paine’s light hearted drawings work to inspire simplicity of style: his drawing Study for Line, 2014 is a study for his upcoming commission for the new Central Subway Yerba Buena/Moscone Station at 4th and Clementina streets in San Francisco. Ellsworth Kelly’s perennially loved flower drawings round out the show to underscore for the viewer a focus and appreciation for the artist’s touch inherent in a single line. Every work in Four Decades: Drawings and Works on Paper is inflected but not weighed down by each different artist’s past and procedures.

For further information and photographs, please contact the gallery at 415.781.4629 or info@berggruen.com.

John Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Richard Serra: Works on Paper, an exhibition of works on paper, oil stick drawings, gravures, and etchings, all of which were published by the sculptor and printmaker’s preferred print workshop, Los Angeles-based Gemini G.E.L. The exhibition will occupy the second floor of the gallery space, and coincides with Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art October 15 – January 16, 2012.



Richard Serra says about his drawing “Drawing gives me an immediate return for my effort and the result is commensurate with my involvement. It is an activity that requires solitude, it is the most concentrated space in which I work.” Throughout his career, Serra has made drawings as separate, immediate, and fundamental lines of investigation to his sculptures. They are explorations in their own right, integral to the overall concerns of his sculptural practice, and unique intuitive explorations within their own established criteria. Using black paintstick or oilstick, heated to a viscous and sometimes fluid state, he creates elemental forms through direction action on the paper and the accretion of medium. Serra has also reinvigorated the traditional etching medium, using deeply bitten plates to create expressive gestural forms. Richard Serra's Gemini work has progressed from relatively planar images in his early expressive lithographs to prints with a deeper and more articulated relief found through explorations in increasingly sophisticated screenprint and intaglio techniques. Thick, black ink is evenly applied to deeply etched copper plates to create the highly textured and minimalist prints. These prints, on a grand scale, are evidence of this Serra’s continued ability to convey on paper the weight and monumentality of his sculpture.



Born in 1939, Richard Serra is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Serra was born in San Francisco and he went on to study English literature at the University of California, Berkeley and later at the University of California, Santa Barbara between 1957 and 1961. He helped support himself by working in steel mills, which was to have a strong influence on his later work. He also names the San Francisco shipyard where his father worked as a pipe-fitter as another important influence. Serra’s sculpture explores the exchange between artwork, site, and viewer. He has produced unparalleled large-scale, site-specific sculptures for architectural, urban and landscape settings. Recent projects include the eight-part permanent installation The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim Bilbao (2005) and a survey exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007), twenty years after his first survey there in 1986. In 2008 he installed Promenade, a course of five massive vertical steel elements, each towering more than fifty feet, at the Grand Palais in Paris for the MONUMENTA exhibition. In the same year, a survey of his drawings from 1989-2008 entitled "Richard Serra: Drawings--Work Comes Out of Work" was exhibited at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. Colby College recently acquired 150 works on paper by Serra, making it the second largest collection of Serra's work outside of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His current drawing retrospective, organized by the Menil Collection, opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in April 2011, and after SFMOMA hosts the exhibition, it will travel to the Menil Collection, Houston in 2012. Serra lives in Tribeca, New York and on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.