Richard Serra: Vertical and Horizontal Reversals
Gordon Hughes
David Zwirner Books
2015
Richard Serra (born 1939) began creating drawings in 1971, and they continue to constitute an autonomous part of his practice. Often large in scale, these drawings are typically made with a thick impasto of black paintstick (or, more recently, lithographic crayons melted into a brick), which is applied to a surface in broad, dense passages. Begun in 2013, Serra's Reversal drawings employ two identical rectangular sheets of paper that are adjoined in a vertical or horizontal format, with the black and white areas reversing themselves proportionally top to bottom (or left to right). Vertical and Horizontal Reversals, designed by McCall Associates in close collaboration with the artist and richly printed by Steidl, is the most extensive presentation of the Reversal drawings to be published. It reproduces all 33 drawings shown at David Zwirner in New York and futher documents the series as a whole.