Big sculpture is on its way to UCLA

UCLA’s Edythe L. and Eli Broad Art Center -- a 154,000-square-foot complex designed by architect Richard Meier to house the art department’s classrooms, studios, faculty offices and library -- won’t open until fall 2005, but plans are already in the works to install a massive sculpture by Richard Serra in the courtyard.

The Broads, who donated $23.2 million toward the $50-million reconstruction and expansion of the university’s visual art facilities, commissioned the New York artist to create a weatherproof steel “Torqued Ellipse” as part of the project.

The new sculpture, Serra’s first public artwork in Southern California, evolved from a critically acclaimed body of work that was introduced at New York’s Dia Center for the Arts in 1997, Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998 and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in 1999. UCLA’s “Torqued Ellipse,” which was fabricated in Germany and is currently in storage there, is an open, tilted cylindrical form. At 14 feet high, 29 feet wide and 27 feet 10 inches deep, it weighs 42.5 tons.

Changes are also in the works at the adjacent Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden. Twelve pieces -- including large works by Henri Matisse, Jacques Lipchitz, Auguste Rodin and Isamu Noguchi -- had to be removed during construction of the Broad Center, but they will be relocated when the project is completed.