Making three-dimensional drawings with neon, American artist Keith Sonnier (b.1941) bathes spaces and bodies in the radiance of coloured light.

Coming of age with a group of artists that included Lynda Benglis, Mary Heilmann, Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra, he uses a post-minimalist language that is physically immediate yet associative. American critic Donald Kuspit remarks, ‘Sonnier’s sculpture attracts our attention, like semaphore signals from a strange zone of feeling’. Four major early neon works made between 1968 and 1970 transform the 19th-century architecture of the Gallery. The brightly coloured works in shades of red, orange, green, blue and violet infuse the Gallery with light and colour. Dot Dash Corner (1979) explores architectural space, in this case the corner of the gallery, and uses the language of Morse code where letters are translated into dots and dashes. On show alongside this, Neon Wrapping Incandescent (1969) features looping neon tubes wrapping around two incandescent bulbs, their black wires dangling to the floor.

Keith Sonnier emerged in the 1960s as one of a generation of artists who pioneered a radical approach to sculpture. After studying in Louisiana, U.S.A, where he was born he went on to study and teach at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He experimented with a wide range of materials including cloth and incandescent lights until 1968 when he began working with neon, which has since become a defining element of his work.

‘neon has always been a material in signage that one lays flat, and one in fact writes with. But I began to lift it from the board and pull it into space, and use it in a much more three-dimensional form….which was not the nature of the material.’ Keith Sonnier