Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies
Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana proudly presents a major exhibition dedicated to American artist Bruce Nauman (b. 1941, Indiana, USA), on view at Punta della Dogana from May 23, 2021, to January 9, 2022.
Curated by Carlos Basualdo, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Caroline Bourgeois, curator at the Pinault Collection, the exhibition “Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies” pays tribute to one of the most influential figures of the international contemporary art scene. It explores the persistent, probing nature of Nauman’s artistic inquiry, guided by three fundamental threads in his practice: the studio as a space of creation, the performative use of the body, and the poetics of sound experimentation.
Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Biennale and celebrated in retrospectives across the globe, Nauman presents for the first time at Punta della Dogana an entirely new exhibition journey — a dialogue between historical works and more recent pieces, some of which are either previously unseen or shown for the first time in Europe.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a series of video installations created in recent years, rooted in a revisitation of one of the artist’s earliest experiments with moving images: the iconic Walk with Contrapposto (1968), in which Nauman walks slowly through a narrow wooden corridor built in his studio, attempting to maintain the classical contrapposto pose — a gesture both absurd and profound in its simplicity.
With the “Contrapposto Studies” series — including Contrapposto Studies, I through VII (2015–16), Walks In Walks Out (2015), Contrapposto Split (2017), and Walking a Line (2019) — Nauman revisits this seminal work, harnessing the power of contemporary technology to explore its full potential. Freed from the technical limitations of the late 1960s, he realizes what was once only conceptually possible.
The exhibition places these recent explorations alongside key historical works, tracing Nauman’s ongoing investigation into sound, performance, and spatial perception — central elements in his practice. The result is an immersive environment that invites the viewer to engage physically, sensorially, and intellectually — a process that lies at the very core of understanding Bruce Nauman’s artistic vision.
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