BRUCE NAUMAN
Studies for Holograms
1970
Suite of 5 screenprints
Sheet: 26 x 26 in.; 65.9 x 66 cm each
Edition of 150 + 10AP
Signed and framed
$55,000 USD
It’s a parlor game the art world loves to play: “Who is the most important American artist of the post-pop period?” We’ll throw out a frequent answer—and the one we subscribe to: Bruce Nauman.
Despite being represented by the late and great Leo Castelli, Nauman was often ignored and disregarded as a “Californian” artist in the classic West Coast vs East Coast sense. (Fun fact: In 2012, I curated a show at Sotheby’s old S/2 gallery called “Not Californian” that included Nauman, Chris Burden, Ed Ruscha, Raymond Pettibon, John Baldessari, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and Charles Ray to illustrate this point).
In the late 70s, Nauman gave up the coasts and moved to rural New Mexico. It was a bold move for a young artist of 38, but he’d had his first museum survey at age 30—co-curated by Nauman’s champions, Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum and Jane Livingston at LACMA—so he wasn’t lacking momentum.
Fortunately, Europe has always seen him for who he is. We noticed many European galleries showing Nauman at Art Basel this year.
Nauman’s art has never stayed in one place. It’s psychological, resists easy categorization; his entire modus operandi is, arguably, about challenging what can even be considered art. His neons were the most commercial, but he didn’t keep grinding them out. For a long time, art world connoisseurs (especially dealers and advisors on their way up) realized you could buy a great Nauman, large and visual, for around $50,000. This is still the case. Here is a five-silkscreen set, Studies for Holograms, from 1970.
This set was Nauman’s first print project, developed from images created in 1968 as part of the First Hologram Series (Making Faces)—for which he “made faces” over 11 frames. Here, the artist’s actions double as reference titles: (a) pinched lips, (b) pulled lower lip, (c) pinched cheeks, (d) pulled neck, and (e) pulled lips. Nauman is one of the first artists credited with using holography (which, as many of you may recall, was quite the trend in the ‘80s) as an artistic medium.
While this was an edition of 150 (in sets of five), almost half of them were damaged in storage, so it’s not quite as large an edition as one might think. Editions of this work are owned by MoMA, the Tate, MACBA, Buffalo AKG, NGA, SFMOMA—the list goes on.
So again, we say: buy a great work by a great artist.
—JB
If you’re interested, shoot me an email at josh@thebaerfaxt.com or hit the Inquire button below
Bruce Nauman was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He studied art, mathematics, and physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1960 to 1964. He went on to study under William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California at Davis, graduating with an MFA in 1966. In 1964, Nauman gave up painting and began experimenting with sculpture and Performance art and collaborated with William Allan and Robert Nelson on film projects. He supported himself by teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968, and at the University of California at Irvine in 1970.
Since the mid-1960s, the artist has created an open-ended body of work that includes sculptures, films, holograms, interactive environments, neon wall reliefs, photographs, prints, sculptures, videotapes, and performance. His Conceptual work stresses meaning over aesthetics; it often uses irony and wordplay to raise issues about existence and alienation, and increasingly it provokes the viewer’s participation and dismay.
In 1966, the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, held Nauman’s first solo exhibition. In 1968, the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, and the Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, initiated a long series of solo shows. Also in 1968, he was invited for the first time to participate in Documenta 4 in Kassel, and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that enabled him to work in New York for one year. In 1972, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work, which traveled in Europe and the United States. Nauman moved to New Mexico in 1979. A major retrospective was held at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, in 1981. Since the mid-1980s, primarily working with sculpture and video, he has developed disturbing psychological and physical themes incorporating images of animal and human body parts.
Nauman has received many honors, including an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989, the Max Beckmann Prize in 1990, the Wolf Prize in Arts-Sculpture in 1993, the Wexner Prize in 1994, the Leone d’Oro in 1999, an Honorary Doctorate of Art from California Institute of the Arts in 2000, and the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Visual Arts, Japan, in 2004. A Nauman retrospective was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and traveled to many venues throughout America and Europe from 1993 to 1995. In 1997, the Kunstmuseum Wolfburg mounted another major retrospective, which toured the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Hayworld Gallery in London and Nykytaiteen Museo in Helsinki. Since then, Nauman has had major solo exhibitions at DIA Center for the Arts (2002), Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (2003), Tate Modern (2004), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2005), Tate Liverpool (2006), Milwaukee Art Museum (2006), and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2007). Nauman is also scheduled to represent the U.S. in the 2009 Venice Biennale. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.
