NEW YORK - The Museum of Modern Art's second floor gallery had to be specially reinforced to support the weighty works of sculptor Richard Serra.

On Tuesday, the acclaimed artist unveiled scale models of monumental designs being brought in for his upcoming retrospective.

Serra's massive, walk-in sculptures of 2-inch steel curves and angled walls rise nearly 13 feet high to produce mind-bending perspectives and mazelike vistas up to 40 feet across.

Weighing up to 200 tons each, the 2006 sculptures titled "Band," "Torqued Torus Inversion" and "Sequence" will be hoisted into the museum, then assembled in the gallery for the June 3-Sept. 10 show.

The three sculptures will be displayed in the block-wide, column-free space of the contemporary gallery designed with heavy load-bearing floors for Serra's works during MoMA's 2002-04 reconstruction. These will be the first on the floor.

A selection of his early, abstract expressionist pieces will be shown in the sixth floor gallery, including loans from other museums and private collections. MoMA's own "Intersection II" (1992-92), a weatherproof steel structure measuring more than 13 feet high and nearly 52 feet across, will be displayed in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.

Like his other gargantuan sculptures, the newest were created in a German mill from weatherproof steel with the help of specialized fabricators, then brought by ship to the United States. Serra said he finances these expensive works from his own pocket and with commissions from art dealers.

"Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years" is billed a major exhibition of 27 works that span his career - from his early experiments as a downtown New York artist working with rubber, neon and lead in the late 1960s to his large, site-specific and often controversial works of late 20th century.

His 1981 "Tilted Arc," a 10-foot-high wall of rusting steel at the Federal Plaza in New York City, caused such a commotion that it was dismantled and scrapped.

His iconoclastic works eventually gained wide respect, and Serra is now considered one of the pre-eminent figures in modern art.

The retrospective aims to highlight the "extraordinary invention and vision" of the artist "who has radicalized" and extended the definition of sculpture," MoMA said in a statement.

Serra, 67, was born in San Francisco, studied literature at the University of California Santa Barbara and art at Yale University and in Europe.

Serra said he was influenced by artists as varied as the Spanish painter Diego Velazquez, modernist sculptor Alberto Giacometti and downtown New York writers, musicians and choreographers of the 1960s.

Of his own artistic objectives, Serra said, "When you walk into the room, you walk into the sculpture."