Guggenheim goes gaga for Serra

Richard Serra’s 13-foot-high “Snake” now will have company in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s most cavernous (430-foot-long) gallery. The sculptor and museum officials on Tuesday unveiled a model showing seven other of Serra’s trademark curving steel pieces commissioned to join the “Snake” as a permanent exhibition in the Spanish museum that since its 1997 opening has gained more attention for its own Frank Gehry design than for the works inside.

The museum’s director, Juan Ignacio Vidarte, said he sees the collection of Serra sculptures, which will be open to the public in June, as signaling “a coming of age” for the institution. Among the pieces surrounding the “Snake” -- which consists of three serpentine 104-foot-long stretches of steel -- will be single and double “torqued ellipses” and several maze-like 14-foot-tall spirals, all manufactured in Germany.

Serra, 65, who has titled the exhibition “The Matter of Time,” said he was referring not to “clock time” but the “emotional or psychological time of the sculptural experience,” as museum visitors wander around and inside his massive pieces.

Thomas Krens, the head of the New York-based Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, would not say what the museum paid for the new Serras.