Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman is an uncompromising and restlessly inventive artist, whose work spans a wide range of media including sculpture, performance, video, drawing, neon and installations. Born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Nauman has become one of the leading artistic voices of his generation, known for his provocative and often unsettling explorations of language, perception and the human body.

Nauman’s early education in mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by an MFA from the University of California, Davis, laid the foundation for his conceptual approach to art. His work challenges traditional boundaries, constantly pushing the limits of what art can be and inviting viewers to experience through sensory perception, body and mind.

Nauman first produced waxen body casts in the 1960s when he came of age as an artist. His 1967 wax cast From Hand to Mouth, which also explores the form of the hand in a sculptural language game, is a seminal work. In the mid-1980s, Nauman revisited and began to expand upon this line of aesthetic questioning, a development that would continue throughout his career.

Not satisfied with simply focusing on one medium, the artist once remarked, ‘I’ve always had overlapping ways of going about my work, I’ve never been able to stick to one thing.’ He also began working with neon in the 1960s, creating unusual, off-kilter works that mocked the seriality and literalness of Minimalism, as well as the replication and repetition of hard-edged elemental geometric forms.

Nauman began exploring ideas on language and meaning and their linguistic construction in his image-works with slight shifting letters in the 1970s. The idea of tension inhering in word play came to Nauman when, in the later 1960s he created a video series based on an earlier set of screen prints entitled Studies for Holograms. By the 1980s, Nauman returned to neon tubing in earnest, creating significant, now iconic works, among them Eat/War (1986). The 1980s brought forward outstanding output from the artist that attracted an extraordinarily large public, numerous gallery shows, and many museum exhibitions.

Bruce Nauman has dedicated over five decades of his life and career to expressing in every conceivable artistic medium. Whether working in freestanding sculptural objects, drawings, neon tubing, installations, videos, body art, sound pieces, or language games, postmodern master Nauman makes work that is resoundingly idiosyncratic. He has featured in five editions of Documenta, won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale and exhibited widely in New York, Paris, Basel, London, and more.