Richard Serra is best known for his monumental sculptures, but his pictorial and graphic work forms the intimate and constant foundation of his artistic exploration. From the 1960s onward, drawing became essential to him not as a preparatory study, but as an autonomous field of experimentation. Through the rigorous use of black, grease, ink, or pastel, Serra explores the density of the plane and the physicality of the gesture.

His works on paper are spaces of resistance: the black is massive, absorbent, almost sculpted, confronting the whiteness of the support which it compresses or liberates. Each surface becomes a place of tension between saturation and breath, weight and balance.

Influenced by American abstract painting and a profoundly materialistic philosophy, Serra paints as he sculpts: by engaging the body, time, and gravity. His pictorial practice thus reveals an austere and powerful meditation on perception, where the gaze, like the gesture, confronts matter in order to better experience its presence.