Every year, Paris’s Grand Palais gets re-imagined by a famous artist, courtesy of the Monumenta project. In 2008, the artist was Richard Serra and his work of art was called Promenade.Listen to Adrian Searle describe an unforgettable image.
Five enormous slabs of Cor-Ten steel were set along the central axis of the floor. They were precisely placed and angled, leaning 20 inches in or away from their axis, creating shifting lines of sight. As the sun moved over the course of the day, casting different latticed shadows from the building, the plates appeared at times to bend toward or away from the viewer. At night, with the ceiling dark, the sculpture became “more somber, more of a sanctuary,” Serra said.Richard Serra (pictured with “Promenade”) wants people to experience the art in a particular time and setting: “It’s about apprehension, how you apprehend the space and the piece,” he said. “It’s part of the experience of walking around the space in which the art appears — you implicate yourself in the space, and the experience is in you, not in the frame or on the wall.”
