MoMA announces major retrospective on Bruce Nauman

MoMA New York has announced a major retrospective on Bruce Nauman (Fort Wayne, 1941), one of the greatest living artists: it will be titled Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts and will be held at the U.S. museum from October 21, 2018 to March 17, 2019. The exhibition, which is already shaping up to be one of the biggest world events of the year, will feature works coming in from 70 international lenders and will trace Nauman’s entire career. Drawings, prints, photographs, neon, performance, video, sculpture and architectural environments-all the mediums of artistic expression Nauman has used over the years will be the subject of the exhibition, curated by Kathy Halbreich.

MoMA is home to more than 80 works by the artist, including the 2009 instalations Days and Contrapposto Studies, i through vii (2015-2016), and has already hosted a major retrospective on Bruce Nauman in 1995. Still, the space where the exhibition will be held ( MoMA PS1, but part of the show will also be housed on the museum’s sixth floor) had Nauman among the artists in the inaugural show.

“For nearly 50 years,” the presentation reads, “Bruce Nauman has been widely recognized as a central figure in contemporary art. He has continually explored how spatial and psychological tensions--caused by changes in perception of time, sound, language and movement--structure the human experience. Subtle ethical questions are often masked by strong dichotomies, and sudden twists of meaning in the use of words are key to his artistic arsenal.” The exhibition will be divided into two parts. MoMA’s sixth floor will host six of the artist’s largest works, along with a selection of his works throughout his career, while MoMA PS1 will display 120 works according to the most classic of retospective exhibition schemes: from early works to more recent works, according to a strictly chronological order, but with some interruptions that will allow for insights into recurring motifs in Nauman’s art as well as more urgent ones.

"The title of the exhibition refers to the multifarious appearances of disappearance in Nauman’s work,“ says curator Halbreich. ”For Nauman, disappearance is both a real phenomenon and a metaphor for the struggle with the anxieties of the creative process and those of everyday life."

The exhibition is organized by The Laurenz Foundation (Schaulager, Basel) with support from The Jill and Peter Kraus Endowed Fund for Contemporary Exhibition and support from SUlly Bonnelly and Robert R. Littman and Ellen and William Taubman, The Museum of Modern Art’s Annual Exhibition Fund and MoMA PS1 Annual Exhibition Fund. More information at moma.org.

Image: Bruce Nauman, a fragment of Contrapposto Studies, i through vii (2015-2016)

MoMA announces major retrospective on Bruce Nauman

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.