Richard Serra´s work impressed me deeply, as I was doing my internship at Dia: Beacon museum. Perceiving an art piece not only with the eyes, but also with your body, as you move in and around the pieces is pure ecstasy.

"What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are." - Richard Serra 

Serra was born in San Francisco and he went on to study English literature at the University of California, Berkeley and later at the University of California, Santa Barbara between 1957 and 1961. He then studied fine art  at Yale University between 1961 and 1964. While on the West Coast, he helped support himself by working in steel mills, which was to have a strong influence on his later work.

Serra's earliest work was abstract  and process-based made from molten lead hurled in large splashes against the wall of a studio or exhibition space. Still, he is better known for his minimalist  constructions from large rolls and sheets of metal (COR-TEN-Steel). Many of these pieces are self-supporting and emphasize the weight and nature of the materials. Rolls of lead are designed to sag over time. His exterior steel sculptures go through an initial oxidation process, but after 8–10 years, the patina of the steel settles to one color that will remain relatively stable over the piece's life. Serra often constructs site-specific installations, frequently on a scale that dwarfs the observer.

Concerns quintessentially sculptural have engaged Richard Serra for more than thirty years, although as a young artist in New York in the late 1960s he was strongly affected by the work of a number of contemporary dancers, above all Yvonne Rainer. Such work prompted him to consider "ways of relating movement to material and space," he has explained, in that it allowed him "to think about sculpture in an open and extended field in a way that is precluded when dealing with sculpture as an autonomous object. . . . I found very important the idea of the body passing through space, and the body's movement not being predicated totally on image or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement."1 A visit to a number of Zen gardens in Kyoto while on a trip to Japan in 1970 reinforced Serra's growing preoccupation with work that was defined through the processes of its reception. There he discovered that "your vision is peripatetic and not reduced to framing an image. It includes and is dependent upon memory and anticipation. . . . The relationship of time, space, walking, and looking—particularly in arcs and circles—constitutes the only way you can see certain Japanese gardens."2

Redefining this requirement of extended temporality and nomadic vision, Serra's recent series of Torqued Ellipses elaborates concerns with orientation and movement into tightly contained sculptures that radically challenge modernist notions of sculptural space. For in these works space shifts and moves in wholly unpredictable and unprecedented ways: so destabilizing yet so beguiling is this sensation of movement that the spectator quickly gets caught up in an exploration of extended duration.

Disclaimer: text taken  Dia Art Foundation   http://www.diabeacon.org/exhibitions/introduction/96
                                Wikipedia   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Serra