It’s only when you see them up close that the way Richard Serra talks about drawing really begins to make sense. “Black is a property, not a quality,” he explained, reflecting on the ways in which it absorbs and dissipates light. “A black shape can hold its space and place in relation to a larger volume and alter the mass of that volume readily.”

A series of six large drawings, dated from the 1990 to 2018, on show at David Zwirner London until 18 May, are some of the more weighty and austere images he’s ever made. While other works from his oeuvre may contain more gestural marks or pattern making, these surfaces are almost entirely covered in an uncompromising thick black surface. One work is constructed from four enormous panels, each of which would constitute a large drawing in their own right. Others have a tighter square format with a mound of black that sprawls outwards from the centre. His unwieldy monochromes make subtle distinctions more apparent, visceral.

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Known primarily for his monumental-scale sculptures, drawing has long been an integral part of Serra’s practice, one that has received a slow brewing critical reappraisal over recent years; these two aspects of his work are connected through a definite sensibility, yet we also read one through the other. It was in 1971 when he began working with black paintstick, a compressed mixture of oil paint, wax and pigment which creates a densely textured almost-painterly quality to the works. From the frayed edges of the handmade paper to the pockmarked surfaces, his workman-like execution underscores their sheer physicality.

‘Few artists have pushed drawing to such sculptural and even architectural extremes as Richard Serra,’ Roberta Smith wrote in 2021. Like his sculptures, Serra’s drawings approach form, scale and material with a force and vigour that makes encountering them a bodily experience. We don’t just look at a Serra, we navigate it. An air of sentimentality follows the opening of this exhibition in particular, as it was only a few days ago that his passing was announced. Serra’s death is poignant for other reasons, too. Monuments lay claim to the immortal; statues and grand architectural projects are built to embody ideals that will outlive us. His death, just like his art, is a reminder about mortality.

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Serra’s muscular abstractions, whether 2D or 3D, always took on a different tone and tenor than many of his male counterparts. Where others painted big as a form of action, even aggression, Serra traced his artistic fascinations back to his early childhood. Growing up in San Francisco, he would visit the shipyards where his father worked and was in awe of the huge, hulky steel tankers. Industrial materials were always at the heart of his work, even from his early days as a student at Berkeley where he also worked at the steel mills in the East Bay to support himself. Serra’s work echoes not just deindustrialisation but working-class life, hard fought shifts from Abstraction to Minimalism and beyond in 20th century American art–and it is also not unreasonable to read them as connected with other traditions of meditation and the sublime found in East Asia, a longstanding and generative influence felt across Western Modernism (he lived in Japan, and all the drawings on show are on handmade Japanese paper).

It’s on this material aspect alone that the drawings stick out, although they share a similar artistic vocabulary that echoes from the shipyards of his father: weight, balance, pressure and gravity. The stringent vocabulary of geometric forms lends a sense of legibility to the drawings, allowing us to describe them akin to sculptures. ‘It is not an unimportant detail that Serra’s best drawings are big but don’t touch the floor,’ argued Jeff Perrone in Artforum. Drawing is often related to the hand, as a variety of marks can be attributed to scribbles and sweeping motions, yet Serra’s verbs–and the artist, of course, who once said “drawing is a verb,” also made work explicitly about the relationship between image and language with Verblist (1967)–create a different relationship between the surface and paper support; better to think of enveloping and consuming, swallowing up and spreading.

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‘They are masses in relation to each other,” Serra said of the diptychs. “They are not about composition or figure ground. They emphasize the comparison of different weights in juxtaposition.” Among the six drawings, there are two grand diptychs from the early 1990s, two works from his series of Greenpoint Rounds that he started in 2009, and two of his major multipanel Rift drawings, distinct for the raw white paper that peeks out like an elongated triangle strip, which can be dated from 2011. Where the diptychs play with a kind of dualism, the other large-scale Rift drawings point to the weighty construction of early civilisations like Machu Picchu, Peru, which Serra visited in 1974. Like a tourist, he explored the ruins; he sketched what he saw and took extensive notes, yet he later explained that he hardly looked at them when making these drawings, rather “it’s something that seeped into my memory.” He was fascinated by the irregular cut stones, and how they tumbled and collapsed together, creating a kind of harmony out of chaos.

The Greenpoint Rounds, which depict–if we can call it that–circular forms on a square canvas, began in 1996. The works on show are more recent, from 2009, a time when Serra pushed the series towards monochrome, although some elements of the earlier splatter pattern remain faintly on the edges. He was “trying to see if I could find a way to obliterate the shape even more, so that you are immediately drawn into the field of the drawing without focusing on the shape. What I tried to achieve with the Rounds was to make the mass flood the paper. I am trying to obliterate the shape to the degree that what you’re looking at is a black field in which a tremendous amount of matter is pulverized into the paper.”

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Obliteration is not just something that happens on the surface of the paper–staring into the dense void of Serra’s drawings, we lose ourselves. His titles shift from a kind of nonchalant functionality (Double Rift) to influential figures (Kerouac), groups of people (Navajo) and scientific references (Periodic Table), putting monochrome into conversation with a broader range of ideas and contexts, suggestive of the ways in which history, literature and technology all have their own concepts of infinity, the transcendent and mystical. Drawing was never really about images for Serra, who also described his sculptures as “drawing in space,” although the course of his own life can be traced through his relationship with drawing. He drew as a child, then as “the primary mode of experiencing the world for me and that is still how I understand what I see,” and when planning to study literature instead of art at first, it was a portfolio of 12 drawings that gained him entry to Yale, leading to everything that followed since. He approached drawing with a private intensity that is irresistible, inescapable. What do we see when we encounter these works? Well, according to Serra: “If anyone wants an indication of how artists think, the easiest way would be to see how they go about making their drawing.”

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