The Museo Picasso de Malaga Opens the Largest Bruce Nauman Retrospective in 25 Years

Under the title Estancias, Cuerpos, Palabras, the exhibition brings together more than a hundred works by the American artist, demonstrating the multidisciplinary capacity of a singular and unclassifiable creator.

Double Poke in the Eye II (1985). Neon tube mounted on aluminum monolith. Work by Bruce Nauman at museopicassomalaga.org

Bruce Nauman’s work is fundamental for understanding the evolution of art in recent decades. Multidisciplinary like few others, a tireless creator, a destroyer of boundaries between artistic fields and a direct challenger of the viewer, Nauman has worked with all kinds of materials and techniques to create a coherent, significant and solid body of work. In its 2019 program, the Museo Picasso de Malaga opens, as its “star” proposal, the largest retrospective on the artist organized in Spain in the last 25 years. Estancias, Cuerpos, Palabras groups and organizes more than a hundred large-format works, for whose display it has been necessary to refit some of the museum’s rooms. The exhibition has been curated by Jose Lebrero Stals, artistic director of the Museo Picasso Malaga, in collaboration with Eugen Blume. Between 2001 and 2016 Blume held the directorship of the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin, which houses a significant amount of the artist’s work; he is, without doubt, a leading expert on Nauman’s work.

Yellow Room (Triangular) (1973) Installation by Bruce Nauman. On europasur.es

Bruce Nauman’s work emphasizes the creative process and its relationship with the environment, rather than the final result. For this reason, on many occasions he has been labeled a “conceptual artist”, a partial definition that in no way encompasses all the readings of his work. Nauman includes in his pieces references to all kinds of artistic disciplines, from the performing arts and movement to literature or music. Philosophy is also very present in his creative process, specifically the thought of the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (a key figure in analytic philosophy, centered on verbal language), as well as mathematics and its translation into the laws of nature. With these elements, Nauman generates reflective and striking works that always await (and deserve) a second, in-depth look. The exhibition at the Museo Picasso is, in this sense, a wonderful opportunity to discover or rediscover the artist and his work, being also the first retrospective on a living artist that the museum has organized since 2012. As a preliminary step to the exhibition, which will remain open between 17 June and 1 September 2019, we invite you to visit this article to delve deeper into the biography, works and exhibitions of Bruce Nauman.

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