黑料不打烊

Sperone Westwater is pleased to present 鈥淏egin Again,鈥� an exhibition of new sculptures, drawings and videos by Bruce Nauman, his fifteenth show at the gallery since his first in 1976. The gallery installation immerses the viewer within Nauman鈥檚 studio and practice, as he turns his attention back to more traditional media.

This body of work, created over the last two years, materializes from a return to a fundamental aspect of the artist鈥檚 practice: drawing. 鈥淚 really like to draw, and I was pretty good at it at one point,鈥� says Nauman. 鈥淚 drew for two reasons: when I was making sculpture and installations, I drew to figure out how to go about the work and what it might be, and then I drew the finished work to help me understand what I鈥檇 made. Drawing was about the sculpture, and these drawings are, too.鈥� Now, Nauman is drawing what he sees in his New Mexico studio. 鈥淚 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 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.鈥� The resulting silverpoint and goldpoint drawings reveal the artist鈥檚 efforts to connect eye to hand. Intimate in both scale and subject matter, they reflect his immediate surroundings鈥攕culptural elements, tools, occasional visitors鈥攁nd reference his personal history and memories as source material.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors encounter a provocative series of seventeen hanging animal sculptures, inspired by his drawing process. Primarily composed of polyurethane taxidermy forms and plaster casts, stacked and bound together with wire, Nauman incorporates other materials such as cardboard, scrap wood, steel, cast bronze heads and hammers that hang down and balance upon the floor. Nauman鈥檚 penchant for revisiting and reinterpreting earlier works is alive and well鈥搃n this case working from an object he initially encountered in a New Mexico taxidermy shop in 1988.

For Untitled (Turning, Swinging and Striking) Dedicated to Bruce Hamilton and Susanna Carlisle (2024), a new 3D video installed in the East Gallery, the artist again utilizes his actions within the studio as subject matter. Using a method devised by Hamilton and Carlisle to create stereoscopic video with two iPhones, Nauman circled and prodded his sculpture to make the head of a ballpeen hammer strike a cast bronze head on the floor below, like a bell. Upon donning the 3D glasses, viewers assume the place of the artist in his studio.

The exhibition will be accompanied by Bruce Nauman: Learning to Draw Again, a new 80-page catalogue focused on the drawings, with a preface by the artist and 45 reproductions.