No trace is no trace. The work Equal-Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi weighing more than 38 tons, made in 1986 by Richard Serra specifically for the then Reina Sofía Art Center and acquired in April 1987 by the General Directorate of Fine Arts of the Ministry of Culture, disappeared overnight. It cost 37 million pesetas. With open investigation included then. As a solution, the museum came to a agreement with the artist’s legal representative. But the sculptor set conditions. On the one hand, he gave his approval to the manufacture of the steel plates that made up the work Equal-Parallel / Guernica-Bengasi and, since it was a replacement of pieces and not the purchase of a new sculpture, he would not receive any fee. But the expense of material and labor for the manufacture of the plates was borne by the Reina Sofía Museum.

The agreement specified that the technical and formal characteristics of the pieces that were going to be replaced were identical to those of the work Equal-Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi, proof of the artist’s demands. As revealed by the then director of the Bilbao Museum of Fine ArtsJavier Viar, Serra was a strict artist, so much so that He has even said that a work was not his for not being placed the way he wanted. “Ask for certain meters of distance from the building and sometimes if you are not happy with the location He goes so far as to say that the work is not his,” he revealed at the company conference for the premiere of the five-year deposit by the sculptor Richard Serra at the Bilbao art gallery.

Another of the conclusions drawn in the agreement was that if the 1986 piece appeared, the sculptor and the Reina Sofía Museum would decide, by mutual agreement, which pieces would be destroyed, whether those or those manufactured now, in order to control the existence of a single work. Likewise, they decided that the new Equal-Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi would travel to New York for a retrospective dedicated to Richard Serra at the MOMA. Then it would return to Madrid where it would be installed in the Reina Sofía Museum, forming part of its Permanent Collection. That’s how it went. The sculpture, made up of four solid blocks of hot-rolled Corten steel, returned to Madrid in 2009. The elevation of the four compact masses that make up the installation allows that, only when the viewer walks through the room can they assimilate the intensity of the work and its spatial play.

What happened to the work of Richard Serra

The new one is fine, but what happened to the missing one. Nobody knows. TO Juan Tallon, a writer, was drawn to this enigma and published ‘Masterpiece’ in 2022, a novel that fictionalizes the incredible disappearance of the sculpture. It turns out that the Reina Sofía Museum exhibited it at the inauguration of the art gallery in 1987 and shortly after, due to lack of space, decided to remove it. He hired a specialized company for its custody in a warehouse in Madrid. But when he claimed it again, it was no longer in the warehouse.

“No one knows with absolute certainty what happened to her. and if you ask me if I think it still exists, I would say no. But you cannot be certain, and therefore there are still possibilities that it will appear. I would like her to be still alive and, if she wants to appear, let her appear,” she explained at the time of publication. disappearance investigation was closed in 2009a fact that the writer regrets.

“And the worst thing is that nothing happened, in the sense that no one took responsibility. This would not have happened in another country, but here everyone continued in their jobs,” he told ‘Now What I Read’. But the theories about what happened are there, from a robbery organized by criminal experts or even its foundry to sell it for pieces on the black market. The Galician has compiled all the options in his book. History, his history, will not be able to disappear from the face of the earth as the more than 38-ton monument has done.