Richard Serra is having his first retrospective in New York in 20 years, and he’s nervous. A major exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2004 was well received, but doing a show in his hometown “makes me feel more exposed and self-conscious and modest,” Mr. Serra told a small audience of reporters gathered yesterday at the Museum of Modern Art, where his exhibition, “Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years” opens on June 3.

Mr. Serra has good reason to feel slightly vulnerable in New York, because his relationship with the city has not been easy. He said yesterday that he felt he was always “bashed” by critics until his show of “Torqued Ellipses” at the Dia Center for the Arts in 1997, but he did not mention one of the most notorious and painful events in his New York life: the battle over and ultimate removal of his 120-footlong, 12-foot-high sculpture “Tilted Arc” from Federal Plaza. After it was installed in 1981, workers in the neighborhood protested that the rusted steel sculpture, which had been commissioned by the federal government, obstructed the plaza and effectively ended its use. Mr. Serra argued that because the sculpture was made for the site, to move it would be to destroy it. In 1989, the sculpture was carted off to a motor-vehicle compound in Brooklyn.

The MoMA exhibition, in the works for several years, has three parts. Three new works of sculpture (“Band,” “Torqued Torus Inversion,” and “Sequence”) will be exhibited in the second-floor contemporary art galleries; two pieces owned by MoMA (“Intersection II” and “Torqued Ellipse IV”) will be installed in the sculpture garden; and two dozen smaller pieces, primarily from the 1960s, will be exhibited on the sixth floor, in the International Council for the Museum of Modern Art Gallery. (These works were originally going to constitute a separate, concurrent exhibition at Dia’s former gallery in Chelsea. After Dia closed that space, the institutions decided to fold the exhibitions into one, jointly curated by MoMA’s curator, Kynaston McShine, and Dia’s, Lynne Cook.)

In the construction of MoMA’s new building, the second-floor contemporary galleries were specifically designed to accommodate works on the scale of Mr. Serra’s.

Even with this planning, getting Mr. Serra’s works into the museum will be a production. Visitors will be able to see the process begin soon: During two Saturdays in April, the works going into the sculpture garden will be hoisted by a crane over the wall on 54th Street. Later, in mid-May, the new pieces will be lifted, also probably by crane, to the height of the second floor and brought in through the doors.

Arrayed around the room yesterday were photographs of all the works in the exhibition, including the new ones, photographed in the factory in Siegen, Germany, where they were manufactured. On a table in the middle of the room, 1-inch-to-1-foot-scale models of the works showed how they will look when installed in the second gallery gallery.

Walking around the room, Mr. Serra used the photographs to tell an abbreviated story of his artistic development. He mentioned two important early epiphanies. An idea handed down from Josef Albers in a design course at Yale Art School — “Matter imposes its own form on form” — inspired his interest in the unique properties and behavior of materials (as had, one imagines, his job during college at U.S. Steel). Then, on a trip to Spain, he saw Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” and realized that with the mirror in the background, Velázquez had made him, the viewer, the real subject of the painting. Velázquez’s achievement not only convinced Mr. Serra that he was not a painter, but it also launched him on a lifelong quest to create art that activates viewers and makes them part of the piece.

If this is part of why Mr. Serra is now celebrated, it is also what once made his works hard for people to accept: The sculpture conscripted you into interacting with it, whether you wanted to or not.

Yesterday, Mr. Serra told stories about his scene in the 1960’s, which included the composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich and the choreographer Yvonne Rainer. In their group, it didn’t matter whether you were a musician or an artist or a dancer, he said; everyone fed off everyone else’s work, and everyone partied together. “I’m not going to say it was a great time because people were smoking a lot of dope,” he said, “but it was a great time because people were smoking a lot of dope.”

This doesn’t mean they didn’t take themselves and their artistic experiments seriously. On the contrary, the stakes were very high. Mr. Serra pointed to the photograph of one of the works in the exhibition, “One Ton Prop (House of Cards)” (1969), in which he leaned four lead plates against one another. “My wife saw this piece. She said, ‘Richard, you can’t show that; it’s not art,'” Mr. Serra recalled. “We got divorced.”

MoMA had supplied the room with a dry-erase board, since Mr. Serra can’t talk about his work without simultaneously drawing. He explained how he got the idea for his now lengthy series of “Torqued Ellipses” from Borromini’s church San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. The church has ellipses on the floor and on the ceiling. When Mr. Serra first walked in, he thought that Borromini had twisted the ellipses in different directions — something he had never seen done before. Once he was fully inside, he realized he was wrong, but he became determined to try to do himself what he had momentarily seen: to separate two ellipses, turn them so that their long axes were at right angles to each other, and wrap a skin around the resulting shape. He called his friend Frank Gehry’s engineer to ask him if it could be done; the engineer said probably not.

After many more conversations, Mr. Serra’s assistant finally suggested building the ellipses (which would ultimately be voids) out of wood, with a dowel between them. The two rolled this lopsided wheel up in a strip of lead, attached the lead to itself, trimmed off the edges, removed the wood, and voilà! They had a model. It was thrilling, Mr. Serra said. “This little thing we did hadn’t been done before, in nature or in architecture.”

Still, it took a long time to manufacture the first three “Torqued Ellipses,” which were shown at Dia in 1997. On the first attempt, a steel plate broke right in front of him, Mr. Serra said. It made a sound like a crack of lightning, and he thought it would crush him. More important, “there was $20,000 down the tubes,” he said.

Mr. Serra referred to “the aspect of play” in art — of experimenting and being in the immediate moment. Although many people have considered his work menacing, he is also playful and down-to-earth. Someone asked if in his use of curved surfaces he is inspired by skateboarding environments. He said no, but that he was influenced by having been a surfer, which was not that different. “Surfing had a lot to do with what informed me later on, if you think about balance, and moving through space,” he said.

And, in a sign of how transporting vigorous — even dangerous — physical engagement with the world has always been for him, he reached for a football image to express how he expects his anxiety to ease when the exhibition finally opens. “Once the kick-off [happens],” he said, “you’re on the field.”