Gutter Splash Two Corner Cast

Gutter Splash Two Corner Cast was the first large work in De Pont Museum’s collection to be created on site. In the spring of 1992, six months before the museum opened, Richard Serra was invited to make the piece in situ. In one of the spaces previously used to store wool, he allowed the robust architecture of the former woollen mill and the massive, unpolished material of his work to literally collide with one another. 

Gutter Splash Two Corner Cast consists of two parts and refers to Serra’s early Splashings and Castings from the 1960’s. For the splash aspect, Serra threw molten lead against the wall, precisely at the transition between floor and wall. The liquid metal spattered in all directions, flowed along the floor and, like lava, congealed into random blobs. This resulted in a lead edge that forms a kind of skirting board where the two architectural planes meet.

For the second part, Two Corner Cast, Serra placed a steel plate at a 45-degree angle in the left corner of the room, then tossed molten lead into the resulting pointed space. After making three of these arrowhead-shaped casts, he moved the sheet to the righthand corner, where he created three more casts and then left the plate in place. The casts were later arranged on the floor in two stacks of three.

Gutter Splash Two Corner Cast demonstrates Serra’s conceptual and process-oriented approach to making art. The work itself is full of contradictions. The action is the result. Serra connects movement and stillness, a sense of mass and a certain subtlety. The lead appears both hard and brittle, the form simultaneously robust and elegant. Serra demonstrates that art can arise from a gesture, from an action which the artist cannot fully control. The material creates forms at random, while the result poses fundamental questions about what is and is not sculpture.