Keith Sonnier: Portals

Keith Sonnier (born 1941), along with his contemporaries Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro and Richard Tuttle, was a leader in Postminimalist art who radically reinvented sculpture in the late 1960s. The artist experimented with previously unused materials―latex and satin, found objects, transmitters and video―until he settled upon his signature work with neon. Sonnier sketches lines, arches and curves before rendering them in glass tubing enclosed neon, creating works of line and color that become architectural installations. Keith Portals documents the artist’s latest eponymous series of 14 wall-mounted sculptures, in which neon is investigated architecturally as well as iconographically, serving as an entrance point for readers to examine Sonnier’s process. The artist has taken the orphic allegory of the portal and explored its various historical manifestations with delightful humor, evoking something more corporeal than architectural in the tension between penetration and accommodation.