Punta della Dogana | BRUCE NAUMAN: CONTRAPPOSTO STUDIES

Punta della Dogana, Venezia

BRUCE NAUMAN

Contrapposto studies

Punta della Dogana, Venezia

21 March 2021 – 9 January 2022

Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana presents a major exhibition dedicated to the US artist Bruce Nauman (1941, Indiana, USA), entitled “Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies,” and 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 Pinault Collection, in close collaboration with the artist. 

The show is scheduled to open on March 21st, 2021 at Punta della Dogana and will remain open until 9 January 2022. 

The exhibition in Venice is focused on a series of recent video installation that Nauman has developed in the last five years and are related to a single channel video from 1968, “Walk with Contrapposto.” The show includes a comprehensive survey of that series along with a number of earlier performances, installations and videos that provide the overall context for the recent work. From the 1960s to today, Bruce Nauman has constantly experimented with different artistic languages – from photography to performance, sculpture and video – to explore and mine their potentialities in a body of work that relentlessly explores the human condition while interrogating the very definition of what constitutes artistic practice. 

In classical art, the term Contrapposto refers to a pose in which the standing figure slightly twists off-axis so that the upper and the lower bodies turn in opposite ways, in search of a balance. The adoption of the contrapposto revolutionised sculpture in Ancient Greece and was further developed in painting and sculpture throughout the history of art – from the Renaissance, all the way to Nauman’s contemporary experiments with moving images. 

The series “Contrapposto Studies” (that includes “Contrapposto Studies I-VII”, 2015/16; “Contrapposto Studies i-vii”, 2015/16; “Walks In Walks Out”, 2015; “Contrapposto Split,” 2017, and “Walking the Line,” 2019), represents the first time in which Nauman has explicitly revisited an earlier work to use it as the point of departure for his practice.  Initially, he aimed to go beyond the limits imposed by the technology available in the late 1960s, the time when he produced the first “Walk with Contrapposto” in which we see the artist walk in a narrow wooden corridor built inside his studio while trying to maintain the classical pose. 

The exhibition, conceived as an ascending spiralling itinerary through the spaces of Punta della Dogana, has been designed to immerse the viewers into Nauman’s explorations of performance, sound and space by presenting the works of the Contrapposto series along with earlier works across media.

Bruce Nauman was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2009. His work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions around the world, including in a major retrospective first presented at the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel and later at the MoMA, New York, in 2018-19. 

“Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies” is part of the series of monographic exhibitions dedicated by Palazzo Grassi to major contemporary artists. Palazzo Grassi

The exhibitions ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson. Le Grand Jeu’ and ‘Youssef Nabil. Once Upon a Dream, on view at Palazzo Grassi from 11 July 2020, will be prolonged until 20 March 2021. The rooms of Palazzo Grassi will then be closed to the public in order to carry out necessary building maintenance works for approximately seven months.                                                                                                                      Palazzo Grassi will reopen to the public 2022. 

In 2021, the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi will be regularly open on the occasion of cultural events. 

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