Steel is a tough medium; we don’t associate it with objects of poetic elegance. Yet, American sculptor Richard Serra, who died this week at the age of 85, was known by his colleagues as “the poet of iron.” It is fitting respect to a man who’s renowned for his colossal sculptures of rusted steel that now grace public spaces and museums all over the world.

Born in San Francisco in 1938 to a Russian-Jewish mother and a Spanish father who fitted pipes in a shipyard, the young Serra originally aspired to be a painter but instead ended up as one of greatest sculptors of the modern era. His sculptures were singular among sculptors – they were immense, yet posses an improbable flowing geometry that invite viewers to explore to walk around to touch and feel them. These pieces were assembled from giant plates of cold rolled steel made in mills more accustomed to fabricating the hulls of ships. Some were so heavy that they required permits to cross bridges and cranes with elaborate rigging to be set in place.

Serra’s early work were often controversial and met with opposition. This was the case with “Tilted Arc,” a 1981 work commissioned by the General Services Administration. The sculpture — a gently curving, slightly leaning wall of rusting steel 12 feet high and 120 feet long — was installed in a plaza in front of a federal office building in Lower Manhattan. Some people who worked there regarded it as an eyesore and a danger and petitioned to have it removed, which it was eventually. Angry but undeterred, Serra continued making more versions of “Titled Arc” which grew into the torqued ellipses, spirals and double spirals that eventually attracted more admirers, with people lining up around the block to see his epic New York gallery shows, especially in the Gagosian Gallery’s yawning space on West 24th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Serra never thought of his sculptures as a reflection of his interior self, though in many ways, his sculptures share something with the Abstract Expressionist who felt that their large paintings should be experienced up close. Indeed, he once said that his colossal scultures required a lot of “walking and looking” and was “viewer-centered”: Its meanings were to be arrived at by individual exploration and reflection.

Up until his death Serra was regarded as the best-known living sculptor in the US, his chunky art increasingly at odds with the of the ephemeral lightness of the digital era. When asked by the conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin in 2015 which other artists approached sculpture like he did, he replied: “I don’t think anyone does.”

More Works by Richard Serra

Watch: Richard Serra on the Tactile Experience of Art