Following the great retrospective dedicated to Jannis Kounellis, the Madre Museum, in cooperation with Tate Liverpool, organises Bruce Nauman’s exhibition, Make Me Think Me.
The exhibition has been curated by Laurence Sillars – Exhibitions and Collections curator at Tate Liverpool – and will be held in the area dedicated to temporary exhibitions, on the 3rd floor of the museum, from 7 October 2006 to 8 January 2007. Over fifty works from 1966 – 2005 will be on display, representing the highlights of the artist’s career and including sculptures, neon signs, videos, performances and drawings. The focus of the exhibition is on Nauman’s fascination with and manipulation of language, including puns and repetition, and on the possibility to exert control over the audience. The role of viewers in inhabiting and moving through Nauman’s works is also examined alongside the use and potential of the body in today’s technological society.
Bruce Nauman is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artists of the post-war period. His pioneering explorations of sculpture, video, performance and environments have left their mark on several generations of artists since the 1970s. In a lucid analysis of human condition, the artist uses the artistic process to create a number of experimental activities in several areas, including written and spoken language and behaviour. In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, the Madre director Eduardo Cicelyn writes: “Anti-aesthetic by choice, Nauman uses photography, video, sound, sculpture and installation to reproduce actions or produce situations which are liable to more or less binding interpretations. While the authors of such interpretations are always identifiable, the viewer is urged to observe, take a stance and react. In synthesis, we may argue that Nauman’s work is not made to be contemplated or to raise emotions, but rather to act as a communication tool, a medium creating a mental and symbolic contact between an artist and his audience, or better between subject and object, between I and you.”
Bruce Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941. his first solo exhibition was held in 1966 at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles. One of the major retrospectives of his work is the travelling exhibition held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and at the Reina Sofia in Madrid in the 1990s. In 1999 he received the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale.