Renowned sculptor Serra is the man behind those massive, abstract steel sculptures you've seen on college campuses and in public squares.

Born in San Francisco to a Spanish father and a Russian Jewish mother, Serra worked in a steel factory—portentously, it would transpire—to pay for grad school at Yale, where his classmates included Chuck Close and Brice Marden. After graduating with an MFA in 1964, Serra headed to Paris and Florence, where he says he moved from painting to sculpture after seeing works by Duchamp and Picasso. He returned to the States in 1966, falling in with artists like Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Smithson. It was in the mid-60s that Serra began experimenting with using metal in his artwork and in 1968, he exhibited a molten lead performance-sculpture called Splashing in a warehouse procured by Leo Castelli. The critically acclaimed show led to Serra's first major sculpture commission: three 60-foot-long steel plates placed at precisely calibrated angles, installed on the grounds of publisher/art collector Joseph Pulitzer's house outside St. Louis. Over the following three decades, the scale of Serra's work has grown along with his reputation, and now his gargantuan yet minimalist steel sculptures grace public spaces all over the U.S.

Serra recently enjoyed a huge burst of publicity, thanks to his 2007 MoMA retrospective, "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years." The show mainly featured Serra's late-career work, including colossal, serpentine pieces like Torqued Ellipse IV. Of course, Serra doesn't exactly create the sort of work collectors can easily pick up and place in their living room—his pieces can weigh up to 20 tons, and even the construction of the new MoMA had to account for the weight of Serra's work on the second floor—although if you're rich enough to be buying his art, you can probably create a space to accommodate it. [Image via Getty]