Richard Nonas
dal 25/9/2008 al 14/11/2008
Segnalato da
25/9/2008
Richard Nonas
Esso Gallery, New York
Nonas began to construct his sculptures in the middle 1960s after a ten year career in anthropology. He is a sculptor of spatial material presence, of combined simple elements that expand to become whole places. His work combines radical literalism with the shifting edge of not-quite-paradox.
Jennifer Bacon and Filippo Fossati are pleased to announce the opening
of the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Richard Nonas on Friday,
September 26, 2008
Richard Nonas is the artist as explorer; the artist who risks travel
on a non-existent geographic map that he himself has drawn. Born in
1936, he began to construct his sculptures in the middle 1960s after a
ten year career in anthropology which included years of fieldwork with
American Indians both in Northern Mexico/Southern Arizona and in
Northern Canada. — Writing about his work there, Nonas says he found
words too specific to directly convey the shifting and ambiguous
complexity he sensed; writing itself seemed too shaped by grammar to
communicate the immediate all-at-once doubleness of the reality that
moved him. Yet he also noticed then that some of the physical objects
surrounding him could indeed capture and hold that doubleness. —In
their hard chaotic singularity, physical things could be made to
embody a vibrating ambiguity of meaning and feeling, could even
convert that ambiguity to an emotionally felt place, a bounded
geographical site that then defined it.
Nonas has become the sculptor of those charged, object-made places.
He is a sculptor of spatial material presence ‑‑of combined simple
elements that expand to become whole places. His work combines radical
literalism with the shifting edge of not-quite-paradox. —The great
Italian collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo recently wrote that
"Nonas is the most radical of the minimalist artists that I collected
in the 60s and 70s. ..[He] has transformed [his] anthropological
search for the primordial nature of human beings into his sculptures."
He is a sculptor of complexity in simplicity, of pervasive emotion in
rough abstract physical form.
In cowboy coffee/new work, old ground at Esso Gallery, Nonas has used
a set of nine new large wooden wall-sculptures —all based on the same
rough and simple form— to define and connect four rooms each
containing a steel floor sculpture from a different decade of his work.
Nonas' works are included in some of the most important public and
private collections in the world. His contribution to contemporary
sculpture is recognized globally.
Opening Reception: Friday, September 26, 6 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Esso gallery
531W 26th St, 2nd floor - New York
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Free admission