To Stop and Look: Richard Serra's Icelandic Sculpture Afangar and Related Notebook Drawings

Richard Serra completed Afangar, a sculpture sharing the name of Jon Helgason's poem, in 1990. Serra was invited to complete this work for the Reykjavik Arts Festival and was granted special permission to build the site-specific sculpture on the treeless landscape of Vesturey, the Northern landmass of Viðey, an island northeast of Reykjavik, Iceland. It is composed of nine pairs of columnar basalt stones mined from Hreppholar and transported to Vesturey. The locations of the stone pairs were selected by Serra in order to frame specific features in the surrounding landscape and were placed in a way so that a visitor can measure the changes in the land as he moves. After the sculpture was completed, Serra created numerous drawings (select drawings from the National Gallery of Iceland are discussed in this thesis) that provided him with a way to interpret what he saw. The drawings are linked to the location and underline the importance of walking and looking in Serra’s work.