Strategies to make a
Richard Serra disappear, 2026
4 white painted drywall, pen and inkjet on paper, tapes, gelatin silver prints, glassine, pins, xerox, newspapers and hooks, notebook pages on archival sleeves, letter to Richard Serra, vintage pin, Reina Sofía tickets

Variable dimensions
Part 01: 148,5 x 500 x 24 cm
Part 02: 148,5 x 148,5 x 24 cm
Part 03: 148,5 x 500 x 24 cm
Part 04: 148,5 x 148,5 x 24 cm

The main installation of the exhibition contains multiple ideas around the famous and inexplicable disappearance of Richard Serra’s sculpture from the Reina Sofia collection. A full-scale replica of the original sculpture serves as a support for an array of materials: documents, notes and plans, letters, photographs and newspapers. In the first part, a collage of gelatin silver prints pinned to the surface of the sculpture create a reconstitution of the texture of the ‘original-replica’. The indexical nature of photography – and especially analogue methods – creates a direct relationship with the ‘skin’ of the sculpture.

The central element brings different strategies to make the sculpture disappear, including one method that was performed by the artist. After several days observing the routines, operations, and security protocols of the museum, he devised a minimal action, temporarily making the thirty-eight tons of steel to disappear, yet another time. On March 14, a Saturday evening, the artist entered the museum with a number of other visitors during the museum’s free admission hours. The artist then performed a carefully studied routine where he closed the doors that give access to room 102 and placed a provisional sign on the door reading, “We lost Richard Serra’s sculpture, again / Sorry for any inconvenience”.  With this small and silly action, the sculpture was effectively removed from view – for the eyes of the visitors – for a few minutes.

On the back part of the central fragment, facing the streets, a long headline reads ‘Esta copia és el original’. This phrase is an enlarged copy of a ‘El Pais’ newspaper article that broke the news of the first apparition of the new replica of the sculpture.

The third block presets a letter that Ilê Sartuzi wrote to Richard Serra where the younger artist not only pay homage to the late sculptor but also elaborate a few remarks around the sculpture, its disappearance and readings on the original title of the work. With this, it becomes clear that this work (and the exhibition) is about the relation between two artists, where Sartuzi offers different readings about the specific case and the whole oeuvre of the American artist and its contributions to art. On the same side of the wall, three tickets from the Reina Sofia are taped together (the ones used for the action) with a vintage pin from David Copperfield vanish of the Statue of Liberty, in 1983, connecting the two massive acts of disappearance.

Behind this wall there’s the issue of the 1^st of March from the ‘El Pais’ announcing the first attack of the USA and Israel to Iran, somehow reflecting the gesture that Serra did when titling the work. As it is suggested in the letter, this gesture continues to reflect on the ‘equals’ and ‘parallels’ of history. Following this there’s a timeline of the whole case and on the opposing and final block, a graph establishing the complex  intricate relationship between the different agents of the case, between the State, the Museum and the Company (Macarrón SA).

this work is part of the exhibition to vanish