Richard NONAS

Galerie Christophe Gaillard is pleased to announce the opening of Richard Nonas's exhibition, at the Bonisson Art Center on Saturday, September 20.

Bonisson Art Center wished to pay tribute to Richard Nonas, the American sculptor born in Brooklyn on January 3, 1936, who recently passed away in New York on May 11, 2021.

Richard Nonas studied literature and social anthropology at the University of Michigan, Lafayette College, Columbia University, as well as at the University of North Carolina.
Before devoting himself to his artistic practice, he worked for about ten years as an anthropologist, studying the human species and its evolution over time, both from a physical perspective and through the various cultural aspects of human populations.

To this end, his research led him to the Canadian Inuit (notably in Hudson Bay and the Yukon), as well as to the Indians of the Sonoran Desert on the border between Mexico and the United States. These field experiences deeply influenced and nourished his reflections, not only on space but also on place.
It was in continuing his work as an anthropologist that, in the mid-1960s, his artistic practice was born. During his walks with his dog, he began collecting and arranging pieces of wood found by chance. The juxtaposition of these objects within a given space suddenly seemed to address his own questions and opened up new horizons in his approach and his effort to understand the complexity of the world around him.

In the 1970s, Richard Nonas joined the Anarchitecture collective initiated by Gordon Matta-Clark, a movement that could be seen as a kind of antithesis to architecture. That is to say, a social and political critique of what architecture can represent: confinement, compartmentalization, reproduction, functionalism, and so on. To this critical dimension must be added a more utopian spirit, rooted in collective work and a thirst for experimentation on the margins of traditional institutions.

This is why, although Richard Nonas’s work is often situated within the Post-Minimalist movement, it should be understood as a practice of great sensitivity—shaped by his past as an anthropologist and by the long periods he spent with Indigenous tribes—through the lens of a profound relationship between human beings, nature, and space, one that perhaps only the artist is able to convey.

In his book Get out / Stay away / Come back, Richard Nonas defines what, in his view, constitutes the cultural use of sculpture. He reflects on its role, its particular power and its limits, as well as its intellectual, emotional, and sensory meanings.
He uses sculpture as a way to think about space and about what shapes our physical and mental perception of it. He distinguishes the concept of space from that of place: while space may be regarded as a physical property of pure measurement, place is instead a defined portion of space.

Throughout his work, the economy of means and gestures is reinforced by the extreme simplicity of forms. Materials are arranged according to a geometry reduced to diagonals, straight lines, curves, and parallels, composed in such a way as to reveal the structural oppositions (void/solid, verticality/horizontality) of an object within its environment. He also skillfully alternates between the monumental and the minuscule.

Richard Nonas is both a bearer of philosophical reflection and a kind of shaman who re-enchants our spaces.


“Anthropology gave me doubt as a definition of human life. Sculpture forced me to use it. I began making objects that had to be deliberately confused, ambiguous, that had to resist the limits of language and explanation. I turned my doubt into sculpture.”
Richard Nonas


Curator: Christophe Gaillard, Anne-Laure Mino

Exhibition organized jointly with the Bonisson Art Center, Christian Le Dorze, Victoire Le Dorze ; with the support of Galerie Christophe Gaillard and thanks to the esteemed assistance of Estate Richard Nonas, Jan Meissner & Stefan Zenuik. 

September 19, 2025