Richard Nonas: "(PARENTHESIS); (corner to corner, in place)"

«A clogged and formal place. A tight urban world wrapped in history, cut by long lines of woods and stones. Lines that mark both the strong emotional edge of a ceremonial place and also the raw edge and downward slope of its complex meaning -- its dirt-floor shift-and-slide back to old political ground, its ongoing tension and ancient skew. For sculpture is that spacial gap-between, that pass between moutain peaks. Sculpture is that implied absence, that almost-clarity about not-quiet-confusion. Sculpture is that dissonance. The dissonance, I mean, of intersecting and conflicting chunks of human meaning cut into an historicized world. The dissonance, that is to say, of art."
With this first solo exhibition, the Christophe Gaillard Gallery is pleased to announce its new
collaboration with American sculptor Richard Nonas.

Born in 1936 in New York, Richard Nonas was an anthropologist, for over a decade, living among the native Indian peoples of Canada, America, and Mexico. He taught at the University of North Carolina and at Queens College in New York. He abandoned anthropology in the late 1960’s to devote himself to sculpture.

Richard Nonas has exhibited worldwide, building indoor and outdoor artworks for public and private spaces. These sculptures are now included in the most prestigious collections in the world.

His background and anthropologist’s eye influence his artworks and his many writings. Richard Nonas defines what he calls the cultural utilisation of sculpture. He considers the role, the special power, and the limits of this art form, its intellectual and emotional significations, its relationship to both space and place.

In his book Get out / Stay away / Come back Nonas says:

“I place each sculpture to acknowledge the historical presence and meaning of the particular place which my sculpture will then destroy. I place it specificall y to change one place into another place containing onl y the memory, the ghost of the first and very different place. I place it to create a pl ace that was unthinkable before my sculpture was set there. I place it to activel y cut back the given world; to prune and prime it, to add to it, and change it- as all world and nature is constantl y cut, changed and primed by culture."

"I site each sculpture to re-open, then close the part of the world it’s put into. I site it to conjure into human existence an actual new history.  I place it to acknowledge the very possibility of history in a world that slips away .”
 

1  Richard Nonas, Get out / Stay away / Come back (Paris: Les presses du réel, Ecrits d’artistes, 1995), p. 16–17.

Richard Nonas uses sculpture to think about both the space itself and what shapes our physical and mental perception of it. He wants to create places (he challenges the term “installation”) that have the power to question and move us, to transform our view of all the places we live and move around in. The elements that make up his minimalist arrangements – the wooden beams, blocks of granite or steel arranged according to simple and repetitive designs – mark the territory in which they are situated, punctuating the space, inter- rupting and refreshing it.

For this first exhibition at the Christophe Gaillard Gallery, Richard Nonas built two large sculptures specifically for the gallery’s two spaces. To reinvent the spaces, playing with the rhythm of these modular lines, their voids, and the interstices that they open up.

This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Fergus McCaffrey (New York) and Bruno
Mory (Besanceuil) galleries.


Richard Nonas was born in 1936 in New York, where he lives and works. A professional anthro- pologist, he dedicated himself to sculpture from the 1970s onwards. He has frequently exhibited in America and abroad. His artworks are included in many collections in the United States such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the MoMA of New York; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; in Italy at the Collection Panza in Varese; in Sweden at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; and in Switzerland, at the MAMCO in Geneva. In 2019, he will present solo exhibitions at the Gassendi Museum in Dignes-les-Bains, France, and at the Stadtpark Gallery in Krems, Austria. Richard Nonas’ work is also represented in the United States by the Fergus McCaffrey Gallery in New York, in Italy by the P420 Gallery in Bologna, and in Austria by the Hubert Winter Gallery in Vienna.