Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana presents a major exhibition dedicated to the US artist Bruce Nauman entitled “Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies”, and curated by Carlos Basualdo and Caroline Bourgeois. The show is scheduled at Punta della Dogana 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 revolutionized 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.
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 major retrospective at the Laurenz Foundation in Basel and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Website: www.palazzograssi.it
Location: Punta della Dogana, Venice
Schedule: until Jan. 9, 2022
Hours: 10 am – 7 pm / closed on Tuesdays
Ticket: € 15
