On a grey June day just after the solstice, Glenstone—the Potomac, Maryland art haven of collectors Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales—celebrated the public premiere of Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure (2017), a four-part work by sculptor Richard Serra housed in a bespoke concrete cube by Thomas Phifer and Partners. Announced in 2021, the freestanding pavilion joins Phifer’s previous work for Glenstone, a 204,000-square-foot set of interconnected volumes completed in 2018 within a landscape by Adam Greenspan of Berkeley, California-based PWP Landscape Architecture. Both Glenstone’s original 2006 gallery and the Rales’ residence, which sits opposite it across a sea cucumber-shaped constructed lake, are by the late Charles Gwathmey.
The new Serra piece joins two others already in the collection: Sylvester (2001), which sits outside the Gwathmey gallery, and Contour 290 (2004), a site-specific piece commissioned by the Rales that meanders along their driveway exactly 290 feet above sea level. Both are made of Serra’s signature Cor-Ten weathering steel, but Sylvester has suffered more than atmospheric damage; the invitingly canted surfaces of its torqued ellipse have been marred by the footprints and handprints of visitors too tempted by the incline to resist—one possible reason the museum elected to house its latest Serra work within a concrete vitrine, where it can be monitored by a roving cast of grey-clad Glenstone guides.
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