The Matter of Time
Richard Serra (1938 to 2024) · 1994 to 2005
Eight enormous sculptures of rusted steel fill the longest gallery in the museum, a hall one hundred and thirty metres long that Frank Gehry built with no columns so that pieces exactly like these could live in it. There is a plain spiral, a double spiral, a snake of three curving walls, and several shapes Serra called torqued ellipses, in which the top of the wall leans one way and the bottom another. You are meant to walk inside them. The passages narrow and widen, tilt in over your head, then open into a quiet circular room at the centre.
Nothing is welded and nothing is held up by hidden supports; each plate of steel stands by its own weight and balance, which is exactly why the tilting walls feel slightly alarming. The metal is a weathering steel that rusts to a stable skin, so the orange colour is the sculpture's own, not a coat of paint, and it darkens slowly with the years. Look at how the surface changes as you go in, from dry and matt at the entrance to almost velvety in the deep curves where the light barely reaches. Sound changes too; your footsteps come back to you from odd directions.
Serra made the Snake for the museum's opening in nineteen ninety seven, and the museum commissioned the other seven pieces to complete the installation in two thousand and five. It was the largest sculptural commission of its day and remains the single most important work in the building. Serra, who had once worked in steel mills to pay for art school, said the subject was not the steel but time: the time it takes to walk through, and the way your sense of the space keeps shifting as you move. Give it twenty minutes and you will understand what he meant.
Did You Know? The pieces were fabricated in a German shipyard and had to be shipped by sea, since no road in Bilbao could carry them.
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