b. Mamou, LA, USA, 31 July 1941 — d. Southampton, USA, 18 July 2020.

Keith Sonnier is a post-Minimalist American artist. Starting out in New York in the mid-1960s, he completely reinvented sculpture, revamping traditionally used materials and techniques to experiment with new forms. Despite sharing a desire for anti-illusionist sculpture with Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt, from the outset, Sonnier’s works were imbued with a more narrative, literary quality than those of the Minimalist artists. In 1968, Sonnier became one of the first artists to explore the effects of light in his work by making and incorporating curved fluorescent lights to initiate a dialogue between the works and their surroundings.

Since the 1980s, he has received around twenty public commissions. Moreover, numerous exhibitions have been dedicated to his work, notably at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1979, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC in 1989, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2003, and, more recently, the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, in 2018. His works are featured in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA in New York, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and MOCA in Los Angeles to name but a few.