Human Companionship, Human Drain, from Eight Lithographs to Benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc.

Bruce Nauman

For more than five decades, Conceptual artist Bruce Nauman has experimented with media including video, performance, works on paper, neon, photography, and sound installation. At the heart of his enigmatic oeuvre are fundamental questions about the body, language, control, surveillance, and the dichotomies of the human experience. Nauman often infuses his pieces with irony and humor, creates unsettling verbal and visual puns, and makes viewers reconsider their own physicality. His seminal 1968 video Walk with Contrapposto offered an audiovisual riff on the eponymous classical posture. In text-based neon works such as Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain (1983), Nauman explores the physical and metaphorical possibilities of abstracted language. The artist has been the subject of major surveys at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, Kunsthalle Basel, and Tate Modern, among many others. He has featured in five editions of Documenta and won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale. At auction, Nauman’s work has notched seven-figure prices.