The Differences Between the Work of Gary Cooley and Richard Serra

Richard Serra. The Matter of Time 1994-2005. Sculpture

Though both Gary Cooley and Richard Serra are sculptures, their work differs drastically. Richard Serra does large scaled sculptures that are created without drawing out plans before her starts. He simply just starts making a model of what the sculpture will look like once built while Gary Cooley does a process called Lost-wax bronze casting with a realistic mode of representation. The process in long and starts with a mold of what the sculpture will be of. This part of the process uses additive and subtractive sculpting. Cooley adds to area and then carves away what is not need to add more detail to the sculpture. Much like Serra adds and takes away pieces of his model and sculptures to create the final product. Then that mold is covered in a plaster ceramic coating and then fired. The melted bonze is poured into the remaining cavity and left to cool. Once cooled, the ceramic plaster is busted off of the metal for it to be polished and finished. Because of this process the scale of these sculptures are much smaller than the work of Serra. The subject matter of the bronze sculpture in the video is of a warrior. The traditional clothing is draped over one shoulder and painted red to show power. The pose of the warrior is kneeling on one knee. While the sculptures by Serra has large scale sculpture that can be walked through, around, and under. His subject matter tends to deal with space, mass, and gravity. And in the image to the right you can see that the sculptures have flow and movement within the space that they occupy.
Both artist produce unique and beautiful artwork but through to different methods and modes of presentation. I found these styles to be very intriguing, especially the bronze casting to be very interesting and I dearly wish that I had the money to try it myself!