Bruce Nauman
May 1, 2006
Bruce Nauman was born in Indiana in 1941 and received his B.F.A. from University of California, Davis. Working across mediums including sculpture, film, performance and printmaking, Nauman calls upon daily activities and everyday materials. With over 26 solo exhibitions and countless group exhibitions to his name, Bruce Nauman’s artistic influence has traversed decades. Nauman has received inspiration from his various residences throughout California and abroad; these excursions were funded initially through his Artist Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1968. Internationally exhibited, Nauman’s work has been shown at both national institutions, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as various locations abroad including top German institutions.
In 2001, Chapman University received two lithographs of Nauman’s displaying his plurality of mediums and artistic endeavors. The two works, Untitled (Salmon Pink) and Untitled (Gray), both from 1971, were completed while Nauman lived in Pasadena, California and briefly taught at University of California, Irvine. Nauman’s display of three-dimensional space on paper shows evidence of his questioning of the capabilities of a medium. Throughout his career, Bruce Nauman has collaborated with an assortment of artists of varying genres and has experimented with countless mediums beyond painting and sculpture.