Richard Serra: Vertical and Horizontal Reversals

Vertical and Horizontal Reversals, designed by McCall Associates in close collaboration with the artist and printed by Steidl, is the most extensive presentation of the “Reversal” drawings to be published.

Richard 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 top to bottom (or left to right). The area that is black on the top (or left) sheet is white on the bottom (or right) sheet, and the area that is white on the top (or left) sheet is black on the bottom (or right) sheet in a figure / ground reversal. 

The book reproduces all thirty-three drawings shown in 2014 at David Zwirner in New York, in addition to documenting this series in its entirety. The book also includes new scholarship by art historian Gordon Hughes.

Richard Serra’s (b. 1938) first solo exhibitions were held at the Galleria La Salita, Rome, 1966, and, in the United States, at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York, in 1969. His first solo museum exhibition was held at The Pasadena Art Museum in 1970. Serra has since participated in Documenta 5 (1972), 6 (1977), 7 (1982), and 8 (1987), in Kassel; the Venice Biennales of 1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013; and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions of 1968, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1995, and 2006.

Gordon Hughes is a Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University. He received his PhD from Princeton in 2004, after studying philosophy at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. Originally trained as an artist, he holds a MFA in studio arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism (2014); co-editor with Philipp Blom of Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War One (2014); and co-editor with Hal Foster of October Files: Richard Serra (2000). He has published on subjects ranging from Robert Delaunay’s early abstraction, Douglas Huebler’s photo-conceptualism, Jenny Holzer’s text-based artworks, Roland Barthes’s book Camera Lucida, Georges Braque’s still lifes, Robert Graves’s autobiography, and Fernand Le´ger’s cinema and painting. Hughes was a co-curator of the exhibition World War One: War of Images / Images of War at the Getty Research Institute and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. His current book project, begun while a scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 2013, is titled Seeing Red: Murder, Abstraction, Machines.