Richard Nonas
Continental Drift
March 29 — May 30, 2025
The exhibition features wood and steel sculptures created between 2009 and 2020, as well as some rare works on paper from the 1970s and 1990s.
Nonas worked as an anthropologist for ten years and his artistic work, which began in the late 1960s, was influenced by his observation of various Native American tribes in Canada, Arizona, and Mexico.
His sculptures, made from raw wood, granite, and steel, are conceived as tools to transform any space into a place, meaning a symbolic and emotional space. Arranged in groups or exhibited individually, following specific linear geometries, the works establish a direct relationship with the environment. The choice of materials is also made to evoke emotional states such as permanence and solidity, or the passage of time and transformation, provoking a reflection on movement and transience.
In the exhibition, each piece finds its place like in a choreography, allowing the viewer to physically move around the works, inhabiting them or viewing them from afar, as if they were natural landscapes. The sculptures are not just objects but a means to produce experiential paths that evoke familiar or disorienting emotional states, inviting interaction between man and environment.
Nonas aimed to provoke in the observer the same sense of "ambiguity" he himself experienced when walking down a road in Mexico, around an abandoned construction site or through a clearing in the forest, in an unfamiliar place without any recognizable cultural markers. He considered nature (space) and culture (place) as elements in constant tension with each other.
The exhibition at Studio Trisorio was made possible through the collaboration of Jan Meissner and Stefan Zeniuk.