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 But once assembled the pieces were quite simple - one of the
hallmarks of the San Francisco-born Serra's works.
"One of the extraordinary things about his work in my view is
that a small child of five-years-old can get it as easily as you
or I," said Mark Francis, co-director of art dealer Larry
Gagosian's London galleries.
"You don't need to understand a lot about contemporary art to
understand everything about it."
The exhibition opens on Friday and includes pieces never before
shown.
Three of the four pieces are made of steel plates or
weatherproof steel. But one of them is of forged steel that is
so dense and heavy that it required a mammoth effort to install
it, Francis said.
"It took a lot of big guys figuring out how to get it in, and
state of the art trucks and balancing weights and cranes," he
said.
The street outside the gallery was closed for two weeks to get
the works in and trucks could only use certain bridges that
could handle the enormous weight.
Another, "Backdoor Pipeline" (2010), is in some ways an offshoot
of the walk-through snail-like structure that Serra, 74, made
for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
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It consists of a towering, rust-colored 15.2-m (50-ft) long A-shaped
form, made of two pieces of curved steel that lean into each other
at their apex. The shape is in some ways reminiscent of a church.
"London Cross" (2014), is made of two huge, 40-ft-long slabs of grey
steel, mounted edgewise one atop the other in a gravity defying feat
that is only made possible because the slabs are wedged into the
corners of the room.
"You might not want it to end up in San Francisco," Francis said,
referring to the precarious balancing act for the plates and the
notion of exhibiting them in an earthquake zone.
"Before it came we thought 'Wow, this is going to be something
unprecedented in his work'," Francis said.
In the end, though, "It seems both massive and in a way quite
intimate."
The show runs through to the end of February. Prices for the works
are not made public, Francis said.
(Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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