Bruce Nauman
March 2–September 1, 2013
Bruce Nauman (b. 1941, lives and works in New Mexico, USA) is one of the most important artists in the world today and one of the few who actually breaks new ground in his artistic practice. He primarily works with video, sculpture, graphic art, performance and installations. The exhibition at the Gothenburg Museum of Art included closer to twenty works; from the experimental films of the late 1960s to his latest work, the video installation Beschriebene Kombinationen from 2011.
Several of Bruce Nauman’s most important pieces – such as the nine channel video installation Anthro/Socio from 1992 and the blinking neon sculpture Life and Death from 1983 – were shown to a Swedish audience for the first time. Bruce Nauman is a pioneer both conceptually and technically, not least in the way he uses new materials in techniques that have set the trend; neon, holograms, interactive rooms, multichannel video installations, surveillance cameras, slogans, and so on.
Nauman’s works are often based on the artistic act and its boundaries in regard to human rational thinking and consciousness. Not infrequently, there is a streak of irony and dark humour. Questions about meaning, language, perception, violence and human freedom (or lack thereof) are recurring themes in the work of this artist, which has been immensely important during the past half-century.
The exhibition was produced by the Gothenburg Museum of Art and was accompanied by a catalogue with a preface by Museum Director Isabella Nilsson and newly-written articles by Michael Azar, author, dramatist and Professor of the History of Ideas, and Kim West, art critic.
Caption: Bruce Nauman, Double Poke in The Eye II, 1985, The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin