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Keith Sonnier. Ba-O- Ba VI, 1970. Courtesy of the Artist and Haeusler Contemporary Munich/Zurich. Copyright: Haeusler Contemporary Munich/Zurich. Photograph: Wolfgang Stahl
Exhibition
Keith Sonnier. Light Works
10 Jun 2016 – 11 Sep 2016
Regular hours
- Friday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Sunday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Tuesday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Wednesday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 11:00 – 21:00
Address
- 77-82 Whitechapel High Street
- London
- e1 7qx
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Bus: 25, 205, 254
- Aldgate East / Aldgate
- Liverpool Street
Making three-dimensional drawings with neon, American artist Keith Sonnier (b.1941) bathes spaces and bodies in the radiance of coloured light.
About
Coming of age with a group of artists that included Lynda Benglis, Mary Heilmann, Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra, he uses a post-minimalist language that is physically immediate yet associative. American critic Donald Kuspit remarks, ‘Sonnier’s sculpture attracts our attention, like semaphore signals from a strange zone of feeling’.
Four major early neon works made between 1968 and 1970 transform the 19th-century architecture of the Gallery. ‘Neon has always been a material in signage that one lays flat, and one in fact writes with. But I began to lift it from the board, and pull out into space, and use it in a much more three-dimensional form’. He combines neon with other industrial materials like glass, foam rubber and wiring. Geometric form contrasts with dashes of colour and a luminous glow to suggest the syntax of poetry and a nod to Sonnier’s roots in the multi-lingual, Creole culture of Louisiana.
