Richard Serra review – rusting hulks that trap the ticking of time

Gagosian Britannia Street, London
It may look like a big chunk of derelict dockyard but the great sculptor’s new work feels like a monument to our times

Imagine walking in the dark nave of a cathedral. You turn a corner and it turns into the hull of a rustbucket ship. Another twist and you are in a north African souk. These are just some of the impressions you might get walking through the curvaceous labyrinth that is Richard Serra’s new sculpture NJ-2.

This is not some virtual-reality artwork that demands you put on headgear to enter an illusory world, nor are any of the pictures forming in my mind at all adequate to describe the experience of Serra’s almost infintely suggestive art. So let’s reduce it to the bald facts.

Long, dark stains pour down the steel walls that tower above you, redolent of centuries passing, history happening

Related: Richard Serra and Michael Craig-Martin’s 50-year conversation about art

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