Bonnie Rychlak (born 1951) is an American artist, curator, and writer. She is known for her wax sculptures representing functional urban forms and actions of evacuation and for her practice of carving, casting wax, and melting it into fabric. Influenced by the work of Eva Hesse and the encaustic paintings of Brice Marden and Jasper Johns, she employs wax as a medium for sculpture in its own right rather than simply as a transition to being cast in bronze. Her work has been featured in various solo and group exhibitions and is included in collections in the United States, Europe and Asia.
Rychlak is also recognized as an authority on the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, having curated numerous international exhibitions and authored the accompanying catalogs. Her many publications on his art are cited in related scholarship.
Education and early career
Rychlak was born in Venice, California. After attending Venice High School, she studied at Santa Monica College and the University of California at Los Angeles, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. Rychlak received a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1976 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She married the artist Brian Gaman in 1973; together they built a notable modernist art retreat in Springs, Long Island not far from the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.
Rychlak's inclusion in "Selections from the Artist Files" at Artist Space in 1986 on the heels of "New Uses," a consequential group show at White Columns, helped establish her artistic recognition in the New York art world, along with her first one-person gallery exhibition at the Rastovsky Gallery in 1988.Tiffany Bell, "Rastovsky," Art News, May 1989. P. 172. In the same year, she was invited to participate alongside art world notables such as Faith Ringgold, Nancy Azara, and Hannah Wilke in a group show of 12 women sculptors at New York's A.I.R. Gallery. The exhibition, "Blue Angel: The Decline of Sexual Stereotypes in Post-Feminist Sculpture," aimed to "shatter the stereotype that feminism is in any way monolithic."Michael Brenson, "Review/Art: Setting Free the Images In Big Beams of Wood," New York Times, April 1, 1988, p. 32.
In the 1980s, Rychlak created parodies from the minimalist agenda. Reviewing an exhibition of her work, critic Ephraim Birnbaum was drawn to "her brilliant parodies of the minimalist cube. As a feminist riposte to the po-faced embargoes of Judd et al, they are priceless, converting mutely literal primary structures into no doubt rage-inducing upholstered, pillowed, buttoned and bowed boxes."
In a review of the works in Rychlak's 1989 solo exhibition at the Rastosky Gallery in New York, Art News critic Tiffany Bell, noted that “Rychlak contrasts the implied utility of the form with the preciousness of encaustic-a traditional material for art making. One might say it’s about transformation-either art humbled by the use of the mundane material or the materials made elegant and beautiful by the use of artistic form."Tiffany Bell, "Rastovsky," Art News, May 1989, p. 172
Reviewing the same 1989 solo show for Arts Magazine, critic Robert Morgan addressed Rychlak’s neo-minimalist approach, noting that “Bonnie Rychlak’s show at Rastovski (February 2–25) is an extension of neo-minimalist sensibilities but without the distancing effects seen in works by such artists as Ronald Jones, Allan McCollum, and Louise Lawler. Rychlak’s artful abstractions, often based on furnishings, have an erotic intertextuality that brings geometry back in touch with tactile reality."Robert Morgan, "New York in Review," Arts Magazine, May 1989, p.89.
Rychlak's work in the 1990s, which she termed photo narratives, "is strongly illustrative of an invitation to plumb unassailable depths in a series based on photographs, evoking cut up and hand colored 'secrets' covered by thickly pebbled glass. The image inside the clean white box, reminiscent of medicine cabinets, can be read as banal or sinister, or just mysterious."
When a Village Voice critic visited Rychlak’s studio on Lafayette Street before her show opened in 1994 at Gallery Three Zero, she was struck by the familiarity of the images in shadow boxes behind mottled-glass coverings. "Rychlak’s hand colored photo blowups of family snapshots mounted on mirror several inches beneath the blurring glass are mementos from her childhood,” she noted.Arlene Raven, "Well Healed: Three Shows Redefine Art, 'Restoration," Village Voice (March 1, 1994): 88.
Along with these "photo narratives," as Rychlak refers to them, her sculptures in wax have been a constant enterprise throughout her forty-year artistic career.
Later work
Briefly experimenting with colored resin in the early 2000s, Rychlak opted to return exclusively to carving of wax.Rita Compère, "Bonnie Rychlak”, Decors: Architecture/Design/Interior, Kunstenaars in N.Y. and August/September/October, Belgium and Netherlands, 2005, 94-97. "Her sculptures in wax share in a tale of disruption and playful decrepitude. She describes her practice as blunt but joyfully humorous," notes one critic. "Her current subjects are unfixed, drifting between ambiguity and the actual, drawing on unsettling juxtapositions of materials and metaphors."
In 2021, Rychlak collaborated with fellow New York artist Jeanne Silverthorne, mounting the exhibition Down and Dirty at the Lupin Foundation Gallery at the University of Georgia. The exhibition, which subsequently traveled to the Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton, NY, and Project ArtSpace in New York City (2023), showcased conceptual and formal affinities between the two artists' works. "The dichotomy between ugly and beautiful is foundational for both artists," wrote curator Terrie Sultan in the catalog for the exhibition, "as is the recognition that tough topics are often best addressed and alleviated with humor."
Turning her attention specifically to Rychlak's work, Sultan notes that "[t]he common floor drain--practical, functional, and so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible--is in [her] hands, simultaneously a geometric abstraction and a metaphoric conduit: The world is going down the drain, emotions drain away, countries experience brain drain [. . .] For Rychlak, however, the drains don't open. They imply another world, the mysterious, the unknowable down below, and what might lurk there."Terrie Sultan, "Rejectamenta," in Down and Dirty, Athens, Georgia: Lamar Dodd School of Art, 2021, p. 15-17.
Rychlak's recent work embraces the dysfunctional and unwanted, forms that invoke urbanism, industry, and the failed environment. Her process is labor-intensive and transformative, using mutable materials such as beeswax and paraffin. This work was featured in the exhibition "Bonnie Rychlak: Don't overplay it, sugar" at the Catskill Art Space (2025). In the accompanying catalog, Joanna Issak wrote: "The exploration of dichotomies is integral to Rychlak's artistic approach, which consistently seeks to expose the profound within the profane, the extraordinary within the banal, the beautiful in the abject, and the psychological within the physical."Joanna Isaak, "From the Psychological Depths of Drains to the Mouth of Truth," Bonnie Rychlak, Don't overplay it, sugar, Livingston Manor, NY: Catskill Art Space, 2025, p.1.
Rychlak's multi-piece sculpture, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," was one of several outdoor works featured in "Revolution" at Sylvestor Manor, Shelter Island, New York, from the June 13-October 4, 2026. The concept for the three "shelters," sized respectively for a father, mother, and child, was based on the image of wigwams, as Woodland nuclear-family homes were popularly characterized. Not intended to mimic or represent the traditional structure or meaning of the wigwam, they infer accommodation for protection, a shield for security, a safe house, or a refuge from the environment. They evoke mysterious retreats, ones used perhaps to house dogs, hide Continental Army soldiers, shelter indigenous peoples, or enslaved families. Instead of the conventional communal fire pit in the center of the huts, Rychlak placed a drain, evoking the metaphoric role these objects play throughout her practice. What was inside the huts was equally impenetrable; mirrors blocking the doorways only reflected the outside. The installation's ambiguity underscored the location's dark history as a slave plantation.
A solo show of Rychlak's work at The Bridgehampton Museum, Long Island, NY, in 2026 showcased her most recent encaustic sculptures provocatively displayed on the walls below the conventional height of painting, creating a tension in the perception of the works as sculpture or painting. In a review of the show, critic Saul Ostrow noted: "These works are neither reliefs nor shaped paintings in any settled sense. Each occupies the wall as painting traditionally has yet refuses the wall’s authority to determine what kind of object it is." Ostrow continues "The dome-like forms Rychlak makes consist of padded tapestry or fabric stretched across a wooden support, with occasional hardware serving structural and decorative ends refuse both the rigidity usually associated with sculpture and the elasticity of stretched canvas. Encaustic wax thickens and seals the fabric surface, producing a translucent skin that is at once soft, rigid, filmy, smooth, and unstable. It binds disparate elements and discourses into a singular form while retaining the associations her materials and forms carry. The resulting form is simultaneously swollen and compressed, tactile and resistant. In this synthesis, Rychlak does not resolve the problems of specificity and contingency but gives material form to their persistence.
Rychlak's work is in important private collections in Japan, the United Kingdom, Verona, Italy, and the United States. In the U.S, they are in private collections in New York, East Hampton, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Public collections in the United States showcasing her work include The Bridgehampton Museum, New York, the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard University, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center / Fine Arts Collection of the US General Services Administration (GSA), and the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In Japan, her work is in the collections of Shizuoka-ken Prefectural Museum of Art.
Curatorial career
As a curator, Rychlak worked for the Noguchi Museum for thirty years (1980-2010) beginning her association with the foundation as an assistant to Isamu Noguchi (1980-1988). As a leading authority on Isamu Noguchi and his œuvre, she was also managing editor of his catalog raisonne. Her numerous exhibitions and writings include a foreword to the reprint of Noguchi's 1968 autobiography, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World as well as other seminal essays that accompanied exhibitions.Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World by Isamu Noguchi. Foreword by Bonnie Rychlak. (Gottingen: Steidl, April 2004) and Bonnie Rychlak, et al. Isamu Noguchi, Master Sculptor, Sitting Quietly: Isamu Noguchi and the Zen Aesthetic. Exhib. catalogue. October 28, 2004 – January 16, 2005, The Whitney Museum of American Art; February 10 – May 8, 2005, The Hirshhorn Museum (London: Scala Publishers, 2004).