Delight.

RICHARD SERRA'S NEW STEEL INSTALLATIONS AT THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM IN BILBAO ARE POWERFUL, MONUMENTAL PRESENCES THAT ECHO THE BASQUE REGION'S SHIPBUILDING AND HEAVY INDUSTRIAL PAST.

Over the last three years, artist Richard Serra has been working on a new series of steel sculptures that now join an existing installation in Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum. Serra's vast, curved planes of rusting steel occupy one of the key spaces in Gehry's building (AR December 1997); a long double-height gallery like an upturned hull, that radiates out from the central atrium.

The eight new sculptures consist of three double-skinned concentric ellipses and five single ones. Each piece is over 4m high and visitors are at liberty to explore their labyrinthine configurations, experiencing a sense of imbalance, movement and optical illusion as they move around the monumental metal forms. An earlier original installation, Snake, induces similar sensations through three sinuous steel planes that undulate provocatively through the gallery space.

For these latest works, Serra was inspired by Borromini's historic masterpiece of Roman Baroque. San Carlo alla Quattro Fontane, with its elliptical central space and heavy lateral supports. The subtle, curving form of each ellipse was devised using the Catia computer program, originally intended for aircraft design and appropriated by Gehry to create the complex organic forms of the Guggenheim.

Constructed in Sections, in shipyards at Maryland in the USA and Seigen, Germany, the ellipses were transported to Bilbao by boat. The evocative images of their embarcation and installation by Erika Barahona Ede recall Bilbao's heroic shipbuilding and industrial past. The Guggenheim is the first museum to have all eight sculptures in one space, exactly as Serra wanted. They will remain there until the end of October.