Richard Serra
Five Plates, Two Poles, 1971

Richard Serra's Five Plates, Two Poles of 1971 undoes all of our expectations for what a traditional sculpture would be. Traditional sculpture is figurative, it sits on a pedestal that separates its space from our own, and it's usually made of a precious material. In contrast, Five Plates, Two Poles is insistently abstract. It sits in a very blatant way in our own space. And not only is it not made of a precious material, it's made of an industrial one: hot rolled steel.

When Serra began working in the late sixties, he began to explore a sculptural vocabulary that existed outside of the traditional processes of carving and molding or welding. And instead he made his own list of alternative verbs that included propping, throwing, scattering–and from there he began to experiment with different sculptural forms that might result from these actions. His work for the National Gallery comes out of a series of "prop" pieces in which plates of heavy metal and poles are literally held in place by each other. There's never any welding in this work; it's all a very careful balancing act, as you'll see if you make your way slowly around Five Plates, Two Poles. You see these heavy plates, larger than you, that are balanced with the suggestion–just the suggestion–that they could possibly fall. In fact it's absolutely safe and secure, but the work makes you think about gravity, and it hints at danger and maybe even your own vulnerability in front of it.

Take a moment and go up to the atrium and look at it from above. The plates touch at the most delicate intersections. Serra's sculpture is constructed using the same kind of riggers and steel erectors that are used to build skyscrapers. When a [construction] team came here to install the piece, they all spoke about how much they admired Serra's work. They were real fans. For them he was someone who understood their materials and methods, and who employed them in a virtuoso way. It's the stuff of our cities and of our modern age.

Five Plates, Two Poles was made about the same time as Pei's building–two works by two modern masters employing asymmetrical forms. And now that their work has been brought together in the same arena, it's hard not to think about the angles of the sculpture resonating with the angles of the building and vice-versa.