Keith Sonnier at Tripoli Gallery

The opening of Keith Sonnier at Tripoli Gallery in Southampton.

 

By GREGORY DE LA HABA, JULY 2014

The Hampton's summer crowd was out in full force to fete pioneering artist Keith Sonnier on Thursday, July 16th, for his first solo show at Tripoli Gallery, Southampton. Elliptical Transmissions features work spanning 1990 through 2013 and will be on view at 30a Jobs Lane through August 17, 2014. An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Max Blagg will accompany the exhibition. WM

From the gallery website:

Elliptical Transmissions includes media work and objects that exemplify Sonnier’s career-long interest in transmission. Sonnier’s pioneering media work of the 1970s, in which his artistic, scientific and philosophical explorations utilized film projections, broadcast signals, satellite systems, electrical impulses, and sound waves, are the groundwork for his continued conceptual focus on transmission as subject matter. Born in Louisiana in 1941, Keith Sonnier radically reinvented sculpture in the late 1960s. With a B.A. from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette in 1963 and an M.F.A. from Rutgers in 1966, Keith Sonnier began employing unusual materials in his work and, along with his contemporaries, Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Richard Tuttle, and Jackie Winsor, called all previous conceptions of sculpture into question. In 1968, Sonnier began working with neon which became a defining element to his work.

The subject of more than 130 solo exhibitions, Sonnier has participated in more than 360 group exhibitions throughout his career, including: Documenta 5, Kassel (1972); Keith Sonnier: Neon (1989) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Keith Sonnier: Porte Vue (1979) at Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Projects: Keith Sonnier (1971) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Venice Biennale (1972, 1982); the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1970 Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Sculpture, Biennial Exhibitions (1973, 1977), and The New Sculpture 1965 – 1975: Between Geometry and Gesture (1990) which later traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Photo Essay by Eddie Rehm