Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939, the son of a Spanish father and Russian mother. Throughout the 1950s, he studied English literature at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara. Between 1961 and 1964, he attended the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where he studied painting with Josef Albers and Philip Guston. Serra is perhaps best known as a sculptor, and his sculptural works are often colossal, site-specific installations of steel 'walls' that engulf and dwarf the viewer. One can see these works in public spaces throughout Europe and the United States. Since the early 1970s, Serra has produced numerous works on paper, including the media of ink, charcoal, crayon, and lithography. The trapezoids, circles, ovals, and other geometric designs seen in these lithographs recall the minimal, swaying shapes in his large-scale sculpture.
