There is a football field-sized exhibition space at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, dedicated to a grand Richard Serra installation. The space holds seven commissioned works that make up the installation entitled The Matter of Time. The installation is epic, and as a result a smaller adjacent gallery filled with his models is often overshadowed. The image here is one of several scaled models Serra used to explore and test his spatial investigations that were placed in this antechamber. Serra chooses to work through scaled models rather than through sketching. This is how he determines if the piece is properly resolved and successful.
His models are simple yet incredibly direct — they utilize the same materials and are shaped with the same type of equipment used to form the finished sculpture. The massive, curved planes are self-supporting, so he is also able to simulate or demonstrate the works’ structural stability. Notations appear directly on the model locating slabs and seams. These models become the blueprints or directions used to fabricate the full-scale sculptures. For those of us interested in how things are made, this display was, in many ways, more rewarding and insightful than the main exhibition.