Bruce Nauman: Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies

Palazzo Grassi—Punta della Dogana presents a major exhibition dedicated to Bruce Nauman (1941, Indiana, USA) at Punta della Dogana, Venice, from May 23, 2021 to January 9, 2022.

The unique exhibition Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, curated by Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Caroline Bourgeois, curator at Pinault Collection, brings together older works and the most recent ones, some of which are new or have never been exhibited in Europe before.

From the 1960s to today, Bruce Nauman has constantly experimented with different artistic languages—from photography to performance, sculpture and video—to explore and mine their potentialities in a body of work that interrogates the very definition of what constitutes artistic practice. 

The exhibition in Venice was conceived as a choreographed totality, with the earlier works establishing a context for the reception of the Contrapposto series, in order to facilitate an intuitive understanding of the logic of Nauman’s work and of the founding themes of this work: the sound, the performance, the artist’s studio, and the relationship between body and the physical, psychological, and cultural spaces it occupies.

The exhibition focuses on a series of recent video installations that Nauman has developed over the last years and are related to a single-channel video from 1968, Walk with Contrapposto, in which we see the artist walk in a narrow wooden corridor built inside his studio while trying to maintain the contrapposto pose. It represents the first time in which Nauman has explicitly revisited an earlier work to use it as the point of departure for his practice. Initially, he aimed to go beyond the limits imposed by the technology available in the late 1960s, the time when he produced Walk with Contrapposto.

Bruce Nauman Archive for the Future
A series of online conversations entitled “Bruce Nauman Archive for the Future” with curators Carlos Basualdo and Caroline Bourgeois together with artists, art historians, dancers, performers, and musicians from around the world accompanies the exhibition. They take the show in Venice as the starting point to reflect upon Bruce Nauman’s work and its potential future influence.

The conversations are available online on the YouTube channel and on the website of Palazzo Grassi—Punta della Dogana. 

Philippe Parreno, Anne Imhof, Boris Charmatz, Paul Maheke, Élisabeth Lebovici, Ralph Lemon, Tatiana Trouvé, Teodor Currentzis, Lenio Kaklea, Elisabetta Benassi and Nairy Baghramian are the guests invited to take part to the debate.