For over six decades, Bruce Nauman (American, b. 1941) has worked in a stunning range of media, from video, film, and sound, to neon, wax, and performance. His earliest works took his own body as subject matter, resulting in body casts and repetitive actions recorded on video. He has produced monumental sculptures using commonly found building materials, videos that explore violence, aggression, and comedy, neons that display philosophical aphorisms and sexual gestures, and disturbing and meditative sound installations. Nauman’s inventive attitude toward art making has deeply influenced generations of artists and he is widely considered to be one of the most important artists of our time.

Bruce Nauman: Identical features a group of polyurethane, silicone rubber, and plaster-cast animal forms fabricated from elements the artist had in his New Mexico studio, as well as a selection of related silverpoint and goldpoint still life drawings. Nauman assembled the sculptures from polyurethane foam taxidermy molds of coyotes and foxes, wild animals common to the New Mexico ranchland where the artist has lived and worked since the 1980s. The taxidermy molds are commercially manufactured forms used by taxidermists to provide an interior body for skins, furs, and the deceased animal. In Identical Nauman enlivens the forms through composition and replication, casting similar animal parts in plaster and arranging the casts into ordered compositions that mimic their foam counterparts. Wires join and ensnare the abstracted creatures in intimate, absurd, or aggressive suspended configurations—a sentiment heightened by the scrap lumber, hammers, cardboard, steel, and disembodied cast bronze heads that anchor the sculptures to the floor. Suspended amongst the tangled objects and animal forms are the silicone molds used to produce the plaster counterparts, displayed at the Nasher for the first time.

This group of works was produced in the artist’s New Mexico studio from 2023 to 2026, initially inspired by his return to drawing. “I really like to draw, and I was pretty good at it at one point,” says Nauman. “I cleaned up a corner of the studio and started drawing what was on the wall. I had two foam foxes left from 1989, the year I made the Animal Pyramid, so I put up some boxes and used the two foxes for a still life and drew them. I kept changing the configuration so I would have more ways to draw them.” The resulting silverpoint and goldpoint drawings depict the sculptural elements and tools found in Nauman’s studio and served as visual guides for the sculptures that followed. The hanging animal sculptures extend Nauman’s drawings into three-dimensional space; as the artist describes, the “wires work as gesture” and “allow the bodies to move.”

Within the Nasher gallery, the animal forms are grotesquely twisted and contorted while paradoxically orchestrated in neatly geometric compositions. Sculptures like 2 plaster coyotes horizontal, with the four paws of each coyote gently touching, are playful and lively, while 2 plaster fox halves and hammerhead implies violence, with the two white plaster halves of the fox form splayed open recalling Nauman’s 1988 multimedia sculpture Carousel (George Skins a Fox). In one of the sculptures, a hammer head dangles ominously close to the two cast-metal human heads, prompting a sense of inevitable doom.

Bruce Nauman: 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.

“Identical attests to Bruce Nauman’s deep involvement in the medium of sculpture,” says Curator Leigh Arnold. “By masterfully rendering the complex process of casting, he challenges the assumption that the method is a straightforward, one-to-one means of making, illustrating instead the different stages of the process through the display of the forms and molds alongside the resulting casts. Visitors to the exhibition will gain a deeper understanding not only of Nauman’s art but also how conventional methods of sculpture-making evolve and advance through the minds and artworks of sculptors. This makes it a particularly relevant show for the Nasher.”

“The Nasher Sculpture Center is thrilled to share, for the first time, the work of Bruce Nauman.” says Director Carlos Basualdo. “Building off his lifelong practice of looking to the studio for inspiration, the Nasher exhibition presents the recent work of an artist for whom looking back is a way to engage in the forward momentum of making.”