Every sculptor works in the shadow of someone who came before — a maker whose choices about material, mass, and space quietly reshape what feels possible in a studio decades later. In this series, we look at the artists who have shaped Jim Ferrari's sculptural language. We begin with a towering figure in twentieth- and twenty-first-century sculpture: Richard Serra — and with one of Jim's own pieces, The Power Within, where that influence shows up most clearly.
Serra, who died in 2024, spent more than fifty years working almost exclusively in steel — first the raw, rusted surface of Cor-Ten, later stainless and weathering steel bent into spirals, ellipses, and torqued arcs. What makes his work an obvious touchstone for anyone drawn to sculpture in metal isn't just the scale, though the scale is undeniable. Plates that weigh tons are tilted on a single edge, curved sheets lean against gravity in ways that look, impossibly, like they shouldn't stand at all. It's this tension between raw physical weight and apparent weightlessness that gives Serra's work its charge.
Early in his career, Serra wrote what's become known as his “Verb List” — a set of actions like to roll, to crease, to fold, to bend, to twist — that he used as prompts for making work directly from material and process rather than from a finished idea in his head. He also rarely disguised what steel was or where it came from: mill marks, rust bloom, oxidized skin were left intact, treated as evidence of process rather than flaws to be finished away. A slab of steel isn't a surface to decorate; it's a mass with its own logic, and the artist's job is to listen to it.
The other defining thread in Serra's practice is what happens to the person standing next to the work. His sculptures are not meant to be viewed from a fixed point the way a painting is. They ask to be walked around, walked into, and walked through. In pieces like his monumental “Torqued Ellipses” and the spiraling steel corridors of The Matter of Time, on long-term view at the Guggenheim Bilbao, the experience changes completely depending on where your body is. Passages narrow and then open. Curved walls of rusted steel lean toward you, then away. The sculpture is finished only in the act of moving through it — a very different proposition than sculpture as an object to be looked at from across a room.
Aerial view into one of the spiraling steel corridors of The Matter of Time, Guggenheim Bilbao.
You can see both of these ideas in the two images above and below: a single vertical form, its Cor-Ten surface glowing amber and rust in raking warehouse light, twisting on itself with a circular void punched through its lower half; and the aerial view down into one of the Bilbao spirals, its curved steel walls forming a corridor that pulls the eye — and the small figure standing at its center — toward a vanishing point. One is about mass balanced on a point. The other is about space carved out of mass, and a body's place inside it.
You can see the same ideas at work much closer to home, in Jim's own piece The Power Within. The work reads, at first glance, like something excavated rather than made — a long, dark iron form, its surface pitted and oxidized, lined with a row of blade-like fins that repeat down its length like teeth on a gear or ribs on a hull. It rests almost weightlessly on a slim steel stand, two thin uprights doing the work of holding several hundred pounds of cast iron aloft — the same contradiction of enormous mass and minimal support that Serra built entire sculptures around. The stand all but disappears; what you register first is the sheer physical presence of the iron, seemingly floating, daring you to reconcile what your eyes see with what you know about gravity.
Jim Ferrari, The Power Within — cast iron, on steel stand.
The material carries the same conviction Serra held about surface: The Power Within's pitting and patina, the marks of a former industrial life, are left legible rather than smoothed over. Where Serra fabricated new steel and let it weather into history, Ferrari starts with a form that already has that history built in — but the underlying belief is the same, that the material's own record is part of the work, not something to erase. And the row of fins running the length of the piece has the same serial cadence as Serra's Verb List procedures: a single unit repeated with slight variation, building a rhythm that rewards the same kind of slow, circling look Serra's larger corridors demand. Walk to one end and the fins recede into shadow; walk to the other, and raking light catches each edge in sequence.
What The Power Within doesn't borrow from Serra is the fabrication itself — this is a found and repurposed industrial form, not a newly forged plate, and the title leans into that origin, hinting at the latent force still held inside a shape built originally for entirely utilitarian, mechanical work. That's a different lineage than Serra's, closer to the found-object tradition than to steel mill collaboration. But the two meet in the same place: a belief that raw, unglamorous industrial material, presented with almost no intervention, can hold its own as sculpture — and that the real subject of the piece is the encounter a viewer has with its weight, its history, and the space it occupies. That's the throughline we'll be tracing across this series, as we look at the artists whose ideas about material and presence continue to inform the work shown at Casa Ferrari Arte.
“…constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.”
— Richard Serra