Background
Keith Sonnier was born on July 31, 1941, in Mamou, Louisiana, United States. His father was the owner of a hardware store. Keith's mother owned a flower shop and his grandmother was a spiritual healer.
1969
New York City, New York, United States
Keith Sonnier, working on his "Ba-O-Ba" series in 1969 in New York.
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier (first on the left)
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier
104 East University Avenue, Lafayette, LA 70504, United States
In 1963, Keith received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
125 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1414, United States
Between 1965 and 1966, Sonnier attended Douglass Residential College, which is part of Rutgers University-New Brunswick, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier was born on July 31, 1941, in Mamou, Louisiana, United States. His father was the owner of a hardware store. Keith's mother owned a flower shop and his grandmother was a spiritual healer.
In 1963, Keith received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Between 1965 and 1966, he attended Douglass Residential College, which is part of Rutgers University-New Brunswick, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Moreover, Sonnier studied under André Lhote in Paris.
By the late 1960's, Keith, together with his peers Bruce Nauman and Dan Flavin, had begun employing neon tube lights in his work. It was in 1966, that Sonnier had his first exhibition, which was held at Douglass Residential College in New Brunswick. Soon after that, he began making wall reliefs and sculptures from soft materials, such as cheesecloth and foam rubber. Keith also began employing such materials, as fluorescent lighting, aluminum, copper, latex, satin, bamboo, found objects and glass, among others. Throughout his career, he has created a number of works, including "Live Video" and "Channel Mix" series, "Mirror Act" and "Spotted Circle" series, "Modern Relic Series" and the "Oldowan Series", and others.
In 1975, Sonnier collaborated with Leo Castelli and Doug Christmas to produce "Air to Air" at the Castelli Gallery in New York City. The artist also realized numerous projects of art in architecture, among which his work for Munich's new airport (1989-1992) is particularly important.
Over the past two decades, Keith Sonnier has received international recognition for his large-scale works, specific to renowned landmarks. In 2000, the artist created a temporary neon installation on four façades of Peter Zumthor's Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, entitled "Millennium 2000". The large-scale installation coincided with the exhibition "Keith Sonnier: Environmental Works 1968-99". In 2004, the artist created one of Los Angeles's largest public installations. "Motordom" (2004) illuminates the courtyard of Thom Mayne's Caltrans District 7 Building as a permanent installation of red neon and blue argon.
Sonnier has been the subject of over 150 one-artist exhibitions worldwide, including those, held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1979); MoMA PS1, Long Island City (1983); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1989); Sprengel Museum, Hanover (1993); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (1999); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2003); Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont (2015); Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice (2015); and Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2018), among others.
Group exhibitions Keith took part in include "Eccentric Abstraction", Fischbach Gallery, New York City (1966); "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials", the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (1969); "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form", Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1969); "Loveparade", Häusler Contemporary Munich, Germany (2005); "Neon: The Charged Line", Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, United Kingdom (2016); "Richard Artschwager, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Keith Sonnier", Castelli Gallery, New York City (2017); "American Masters 1940-1980", National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2018), among many others.
Moreover, during his career, Keith has also created material for books, catalogues and periodicals.
Currently, Keith divides his time between New York City and Bridgehampton.
Spaced Wall Slant
Lit square
Lit Circle Blue with Etched Glass
Bamboo Sheath V
Cutglass 7
Dis-Play
Cannes #5
Expanded SEL diptych II
Longhorn Study
Baumgate Study I
Ballroom Chandelier New York
Syzygy Transmitter
Neon Wrapping Incandescent
Untitled
Ba-O-Ba
Ucua
Lunar Slice
Zig Zag Square
USA: War of the Worlds
Bound Saw Palm
Lit Circle Red with Flutex Glass
Ba-O-Ba Nice II
Often labeled a Minimalist, Sonnier places bright colors and sparse lines together in ways, that heighten the lights' reflective qualities in a given space. The linear quality of neon allows Sonnier to draw in space with light and color, while the diffuseness of the light enables his work to interact on various architectural planes.
Inspired by both his birthplace of Louisiana and the cultures and geographies he encounters in his travels, Sonnier's sculptures combine hi-tech industrial materials with organic or corporeal themes. Employing unusual materials, that had never been used before, Sonnier, along with his contemporaries, called all previous conceptions of sculpture into question.
Quotations:
"I have an intuitive understanding of technology. And the way I incorporate technology in the work tends to humanize it a great deal."
"A lot of artists are good cooks as I'm too, but coming from a culture that was very concerned with food, I was very interested in that from the start. If you're interested in food, you're interested in lots of different aspects of culture. And it's like being interested in the music from a certain area, or writing, or whatever-food is part of that, too."
"I love light in my work, but I was never influenced by neon signage in itself, rather its effect on nature and architecture."
"Sculpture, for me, provides that environmental discipline, where you actually move in and around it. And if you have a good collaboration with an architect, to combine those aspects of color - I'm talking about color becoming a form within the building - that is a very different approach. I love contemporary architecture, which makes collaboration more interesting - and you have to be able to collaborate. It's like making a film, in a way: Everyone is a part of the team."
"I think everyone at some point comes up against a wall. Curiously, though, if you continue working, you might readdress that idea from another direction. If you didn't try something, you'd never have anything; if you didn't make an attempt to make the work, it wouldn't exist. There have been times when I could not work, and I would just go and sit down in the studio and wait to see what might happen. You can't always just go and take an exotic trip and come back and make something."