Richard Nonas

Richard Nonas was born in New York in 1936 and died in New York in 2021. 

Before developing his artistic practice in the 1970s, Richard Nonas worked as an anthropologist for nearly a decade, living among Indigenous communities in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico. He was a member of the Anarchitecture group alongside Gordon Matta-Clark and Richard Serra. His sculpture is deeply concerned with space and perception, using a minimalist vocabulary of geometric forms in wood and metal. Through the careful arrangement of these elements, he creates complex relationships and tensions that transform the way a space is experienced. Each work develops its own abstract language, offering a new way of reading and inhabiting its surroundings. 

During his residency at Atelier Calder, Nonas created a series of works in response to the architecture of the studio and its relationship with the surrounding landscape. He worked with slate, a material closely connected to the regional architecture and present in the construction of the studio. Exploring this new material, he developed specific tools and created a structural vocabulary around its physical qualities. Through this process, Nonas established a particular relationship between material, space, and environment.