Richard Serra's Forty-Year Retrospective at MoMA

MoMA's 2007 summer exhibition "Richard Serra, Sculpture: Forty Years" brought together works from the artist's entire career, from early rubber and neon pieces to monumental steel installations. Co-curated by Lynne Cooke and Kynaston McShine, the show merged two separate proposals: Dia Art Foundation wanted to display pre-1975 works, while MoMA aimed to present large-scale recent pieces, including a site-specific installation in the newly expanded sculpture garden. Highlights included the iconic "One Ton Prop (House of Cards)" (1969) and "To Michael Heizer" (1969), where lead plates support each other through balance. The exhibition traced Serra's evolution from process art to a distinctive formalist aesthetic, culminating in three new torqued steel works—"Sequence," "Band," and "Torqued Torus Inversion" (2006)—that emphasized aesthetic coherence over material literalism. Critic Robert C. Morgan noted Serra's shift toward a more generous, epistemological approach while maintaining his enigmatic status.