Richard Serra's Cape Breton Horizontal Reversal No. 16 (2014) exemplifies the radical approach to works on paper that has run in parallel with his celebrated sculptural practice throughout his career. A dense mass of black litho crayon occupies a portion of a wide horizontal sheet of handmade paper, its irregular edge contesting the boundaries imposed by the white fields to its left and right. Rather than depicting a form outlined against a support, Serra pushes lithography into a different register entirely: the black shape seems to barely coalesce from the surface itself, suggesting an ongoing process of creation rather than a resolved image.

For Serra, lithography has always served as a means of investigating formal and perceptual relationships—between mass and void, mark and ground, the tactile and the spatial. The handmade paper is not merely a support but a collaborator: its deckled edges and uneven surface lend the work a physical presence that speaks directly to the weight and scale concerns of his sculpture. As with his monumental steel works, the viewer's awareness of their own body in relation to the piece is central to the experience—the black mass exerts a gravitational pull that makes the white expanses feel charged rather than empty.

Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938 and earned his MFA at the Yale School of Art, where his classmates included Chuck Close, Brice Marden, and Nancy Graves. His commitment to sculpture was galvanized by a visit to Constantin Brancusi's Paris studio, where the strength, simplicity, and abstraction of the work left a decisive impression. Serra's works are held in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Dia: Beacon, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.