“It’s the way the piece feels that counts—the way it changes that chunk of space you’re both in, thickens it and makes it vibrate—like nouns slipping into verbs,”

Richard Nonas, 1985

Larsen Warner is very pleased to present Richard Nonas: Language of Place. The exhibition acts as a snapshot of the work of one of the leading figures of post-minimalist art, presenting a selection of works created by Nonas over a near 30 period between the 70’s and 00’s. Nonas is known for his spare modular sculptures, usually of wood, stone or industrial materials, characterized by a unique, thoughtful relationship to their surroundings.

Nonas was a key member of the rebellious, pioneering group of artists that put SoHo and Tribeca on the international map alongside contemporaries including Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Serra. In 1971 Nonas’s work was included in Under the Brooklyn Bridge, the legendary exhibition curated by Matta-Clark and Alanna Heiss, featuring work by the likes of Sol LeWitt, Keith Sonnier, and Dennis Oppenheim.

Born in New York in 1936, Nonas studied social anthropology and spent nearly a decade conducting field work among Native American populations in Canada, Mexico, and the American Southwest before returning to New York in the mid-1960s. While teaching anthropology Nonas began to collect pieces of wood as he would walk his dog, discovering that they conveyed strong and specific emotions when he started to push and place them together. He began taking the wood home and experimenting; having no art background and working purely through formal intuition, Nonas began to create his first, early sculptures.

Nonas’s sculptural practice was deeply influenced by his anthropological work. Through his time spent in Mexico observing the Papago people and their relationship to their desert landscape, Nonas realised that although there were no physical structures within the landscape, the Papago derived their experience from their relationship to the objects, both natural and man-made that would dot the terrain. As Nonas developed his early sculptural practice in the late 1960s, this provided a fascinating lesson about the ability of material things to affect spatial experience, and led him to create artworks that function less as formal aesthetic objects and more as spatial markers in any given space.

Throughout the 1970s, Nonas’s experimentations with materials and modes of presenting his sculptures reached new heights. Nonas used timbers, linear beams, granite curbstones, and steel planes to create his works, which were often displayed in ways meant to disrupt conventional modes of experiencing art. Nonas’s aim was to convey emotional, spiritual and philosophical meaning by way of his talismanic objects.

In Language of Place, the gallery space is defined by the careful placement of these objects. Modestly sized sculptures; simple assemblages of sawn lengths of steel bar or roughly split chunks of wood, sometimes painted, are arranged throughout the gallery either resting on the floor or sparsely spaced along the walls. These sculptures act as “place markers”, leading the viewer through the gallery’s rooms. The artist’s desire was to attempt to choreograph an experience where the viewer could feel as if they are “walking on a road in the desert”. Each object exists within the gallery space and is complicit in transforming that space into “a place,” an intervention that is the philosophical bedrock of Nonas’s practice.

“I distrust sculpture that emphasizes process, duration, or growth. I trust sculpture whose making, and being, is finished immediately...I trust sculpture that does not grow, but simply appears—shuddering, like a knife stabbed into wood.”

Richard Nonas was a pioneering, experimental sculptor who pushed the medium to new frontiers. He naturally honed in on the imperfect, irregular, the rough and unpolished and found in them an unsuspected beauty. In his hands, through his treatment, these materials acquire a curious refinement and gravitas. Sculpture, the object I make, is the way I define my own existent reality, the reality I try to communicate to you,” Nonas once said of his practice. “It is how I grasp the contradictions of my world, find its submerged edges, and discover the forces that hold it together at the same moment that they rip it apart. Sculpture is how I attempt to open the world for us both to see.”

Permanent installations created by Nonas include Lunds Konsthall, Lund, Sweden (1988); Chair, 1991, Stockholm School of Economics; 55 meter long double-line of double-bolders, 1997, Umedalen Sculpture Park, Sweden; La Colonne Terminée III, 1989– 1997, Wanås Sculpture Park, Sweden; Borås Surround 1995, Sweden; Chairs, Skarpnäck Tunnelbana, Sweden; Cranbrook Art Museum, Boomfield, Michigan (1989);

and Detroit Institute of Arts (1997).

Two major forthcoming publications on the artist will be released in 2022–23, including an extensive artist monograph edited by Dieter Schwarz, with essays by Fabien Faure, Dieter Schwarz, and Richard Shiff; and a comprehensive publication of ephemera and paper matter by Nonas, published by Tonino Editoria, with text by Alex Bacon.