For over six decades, Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941) has worked in a stunning range of media, including video, film, sound, neon, wax, and performance. Bruce Nauman: Identical presents the artist’s first exhibition organized by a Texas museum, showcasing a group of polyurethane, silicone rubber, and plaster-cast animal forms, alongside a rotating selection of drawings and a 3D video, made from elements that the artist had in his New Mexico studio.
Nauman assembled the sculptures from commercially manufactured taxidermy molds of coyotes and foxes. Typically used by taxidermists to provide an interior body for skins and furs, the artist instead displays the foam objects as sculptures themselves. Wires ensnare the abstracted creatures in intimate, absurd, or aggressive configurations. Scrap lumber, hammers, cardboard, steel, and disembodied cast bronze heads anchor the suspended sculptures to the floor, heightening the tension of their poses. Nauman renders the process of sculpture casting visible in his display of the forms and molds alongside their resulting plaster casts, which appear at first glance to be identical recreations of their foam and rubber counterparts.
The artist has maintained an active drawing practice throughout his career, using the medium to develop preparatory sketches for works in other media, as well as a place to explore language, and as grounds for his imagination. The drawings on view depict sculptural elements and tools found in Nauman’s studio—hammers, ax handles, taxidermy forms. Viewers become immersed in the artist’s studio, where suspended sculptures twist and turn, illustrating Nauman’s use of wires to extend the gestures of his drawings into the actual space of the Nasher gallery.
Identical takes on the trope of memento mori through its intimate ties to creation, death, and remembrance, given the role of taxidermy forms as a way to enliven something that has perished and transform living nature into still life.
Film screenings of Cooking with Bruce of Whatever You Want
Schedule: Every Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m., 1 p.m., and 3 p.m. in Nasher Hall.
Earlier this year, Kara Walker traveled to New Mexico to spend a day with Bruce Nauman, resulting in Cooking with Bruce or Whatever You Want. Created by Ari Marcopoulos and commissioned by the Nasher Sculpture Center, the film captures time shared between the two artists, documenting conversations, cooking, rummaging in Nauman’s famously disheveled studio, and more. The result is an intimate and voyeuristic glimpse into the quiet and profound moments of a prolonged studio visit.