Bruce Nauman

From March 14 to June 21, 2015, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is honored to present a major solo exhibition of American artist Bruce Nauman’s artwork, the first in France in over 15 years. For the occasion, the artist made a careful selection of recent works never before shown in France, along with some earlier installations, created from a wide array of media that he has explored throughout his career.

This exhibition, specifically created for the Fondation Cartier, provides the opportunity to discover some of Bruce Nauman’s most striking works of the last two decades. It also reveals the often unexplored parallel between the artist’s abstract video and sound works, which focus on his exploration of the human voice and body, and his monumental installations, rich with spiritual and environmental references.

Bruce Nauman is considered one of the most influential contemporary artists today, having created numerous genre-defining works through the exploration of the body and language, as well as performance over the past 50 years. Often defined as a conceptual or a minimalist artist, he resists classification, having experimented with multiple media since the beginning of his career.
Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin before receiving a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California in 1966. He quickly abandoned painting for sculpture, performance, installation, and video, and worked from his California studio until the end of the 1970s, at which point he moved to New Mexico where he currently lives and works. He had his first gallery show in 1966 in Los Angeles, and an exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York two years later. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York jointly organized his first survey show in 1972-73.