Richard Nonas. Slant

About

The exhibition will occupy the entire space, with an extensive, site-specific installation on the ground floor and major sculptural works on view on the second floor. A leading artist of the Post-Minimalist generation, Nonas (b. 1936)—who lives and works in New York—spent ten years as an anthropologist, after which, in the late 1960s, he began to investigate how a space can be changed by the art that is put in it, and how that space then, in turn, affects people as they pass through it.

That marking-out of space (whether indoors or out) is at the heart of Nonas’s endeavors. His often crudely constructed works are made in the simplest and most direct ways available to him. Their function, he says, is as tools or as markers that define a particular sense of place—a different one for each new installation.

The enigmatic or ‘skewed’ quality inherent in each marked place is central for Nonas, who believes that the sculpture is that place. His most recent expansive exhibitions, Richard Nonas: The Man in the Empty Space, presented earlier in 2016 at Mass MoCA, in North Adams, Massachusetts, and Richard Nonas: ridge (out, away, back), now on view through April 23, 2017, at the Art Institute of Chicago, are examples of this. “What I’m after,” he has said, “is one-thing on the verge of becoming another-thing. A kind of double vision, a queer propinquity, an unexpected juxtaposition—or even just a strange combining of everything that’s actually and already there.”

Nonas has exhibited extensively, including a recent installation at MoMA PS 1, and his works are in numerous collections, such as the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Panza Collection, Varese, Italy; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.