Bruce Nauman

An heir to 1960’s minimalism, American artist Bruce Nauman creates his pieces across a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon installations and video performance. Citing Samuel Beckett and Wittgenstein as influences, Nauman explores the relation between our psychic or bodily states and the language we use to describe them (as in his celebrated neon piece ‘Human/Need/Desire’). At the same time, Nauman’s spatial works are experimental and interactive, intentionally unresolved. As Arthur C. Danto writes: ‘designed as language games, they address us less as viewers than participants. To experience a Nauman is to interact with it in some way that goes beyond appreciating it as a work of art.’