Bruce Nauman

Born on December 6^th, 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana Bruce Nauman was an artist destined to do great things. He was a sculptor, performance artist working with video, and a photographer. He is known greatly for the use of literature in his works. He began this study with mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1960 and then art with Italo Scanga as his professor. In those four years Nauman gave up on painting and starting experimenting with sculture and proformance art and working with William Allen and Robert nelson on film projects.

Feed Me

He left for The University of California at Davis after those four years. From there he studied under William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson and graduated with a Master In Fine Arts Degree. Although he was formidable with his work, Nauman’s work seemed art-less. But with his frustration he used himself, his wittiness of inquiry to examine the role of what an artist really is. This later led to evoking strong emotional, intellectual, and physical creations and often led to works of formal beauty. Some of these examples of beauty are Neon Templates of the Left Half of my Body, Taken at Ten Inch Intervals

Neon Templates Of The Left Half Of My Body

Taken At Ten Inch Intervals

and his colour photograph Self Portrait as a Fountain. Nauman’s first solo exhibition took place in 1966 at the the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles, California.

In 1968 the LeoCastelli Gallery in New York and the Galerie Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf which led to a long series of shows.

In 1968 he was also invited to take part in Documenta 4 in Kassel and got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that allowed him to work in New York for one year. He Taught at the San Francisco Art Institution in 1966 to 1968 and then later at the University of california at Irvine in 1970. Nauman moved to New Mexico in 1979. In 1981 he held a major retrospective at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. Since the mid-80s he has be mostly working with sculpture and video. In his years of work he has developed disturbing physical and psychological themes using human and animal body parts. Nauman has obtained many honors, some are which are a Honorary Doctor Of Fine Arts Degree from the San Francisco Art Institute which happened in 1989, an honorary Doctorate of Art from the California Institute of the Arts in 2000, and the Praemium Imperiale Prize of Visual Arts in Japan in 2004.

Since then Nauman has had major exibitons with the DIA Center of the Arts in 2002, the Leone d’Oro in 1999, and the Tate Modern in 2004. Some of his major works include A Rose Has No Teeth,

The True Artist Helps The World by Revealing Mystic Truths, Please/ Pay/ Attention/ Please, Vices and Virtues and Henry Moore bound to fail, and Fifteen Pairs Of Hands.