David Zwirner is pleased to present Every Which Way, a major installation from 2015 by Richard Serra (1938–2024), at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street space in New York.
The work comprises sixteen vertical steel panels, each measuring six feet wide and twelve inches thick. These stand at varying heights of either seven, nine, or eleven feet tall and are arranged in a staggered grid formation that spans the exhibition space.
As Serra described: “In Every Which Way you confront the frontality of each cluster of plates first, and then turn depending on how much attention you pay. You’re led to make a horizontal shift instead of just walking diagonally or straight ahead. Turning around, walking backward, sliding across—that happens a lot in [my work from this period]. Also, due to its verticality—five of the sixteen slabs are eleven feet high—Every Which Way has more of an architectural reference than prior pieces.… It’s always there, not here. Even when you’re right up against it, it always evades you.… Like [being in the midst of a] city, Every Which Way forces you to make countersteps, twists, and turns continuously.”1
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco and lived and worked in New York, the North Fork of Long Island, and Nova Scotia. His first significant solo exhibition was held at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York, in 1969. His first solo museum exhibition took place at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1970. Serra subsequently participated in numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987) in Kassel, Germany; the 1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013 editions of the Venice Biennale; and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions of 1968, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1995, and 2006.
The text was provided by the gallery.
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- Richard Serra, “Passages and Intervals,” in Richard Serra and Hal Foster: Conversations about Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 144.
