Monday, September 3, is the last day to visit Bruce Nauman, an exhibition presenting the work of this Season 1 artist for the first time in Québec and Canada.
The show, at The Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montréal, aims to reflect the multidisciplinary aspect of Nauman, one of the leading figures in contemporary art, who has had a major influence on succeeding generations of artists for more than 40 years.
The exhibition is split in two separate but complementary parts. The first one, entitled Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light and organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, features a remarkable series of about 15 neon sculptures and light installations produced in the first two decades of the artist’s career (1965-1985). Neon tubing fills the space both proposing word games such as None Sing, Neon Sign or Run from Fear, Fun from Rear or showing clown-like figures as Mean Clown Welcome. These light-based works apply irony and humor to the contradictions intrinsic to the human condition and its opposites of sex and violence, humor and horror, life and death, pleasure and pain.
The second half of the show, assembled exclusively for The Musée d’Art Contemporain, showcases a selection of films and videos from the 1960s, seminal video installations from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and the masterly recent work One Hundred Fish Fountain, 2005. In Nauman’s films and videos, which focus on body language and usually show the artist “performing” in his studio, the artist expresses the passage of time, repetitiveness, the ritual of everyday gestures and the resulting self-awareness.
Find more about the show here.
This Friday is the last day to view the exhibition Circa 70 at Cheim & Read Gallery, featuring work by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois and fellow artist Lynda Benglis, in New York.
In this show, sculptures by Bourgeois and Benglis, mostly completed between 1967 and 1974, coexist in surprising harmony despite their completion by two very separate artists within a shifting political and artistic landscape. Working within the charged artistic atmosphere of postmodernism, Bourgeois and Benglis created material-savvy sculptures more attune to messy abstraction and process-oriented gesture than to conceptual formalism. Their sculptural manifestations explored autobiographical experience and the female subject.
Though the two artists are 30 years apart in age—Bourgeois was born in 1911 and Benglis in 1941—their sculptures in the early 1970s have unexpected similarities. Both artists created organically-shaped, often grotesque amorphous forms. Both reference the undulating, layered landscape of the body and its private, internal anatomy while connecting to the ripe fecundity of the natural world, and the earth’s own internal brewing and bubbling.
More than 30 years later, their work provides reflection on our own cultural and political situation. Revisited, it still shocks and is charged with the energy of the artists’ physical manipulation of material and their intuitive, emotional and rebellious response to a burgeoning decade.
View images and read more about the exhibition here.
This Friday is the last day to view the exhibition Circa 70 at Cheim & Read Gallery, featuring work by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois and fellow artist Lynda Benglis, in New York.
In this show, sculptures by Bourgeois and Benglis, mostly completed between 1967 and 1974, coexist in surprising harmony despite their completion by two very separate artists within a shifting political and artistic landscape. Working within the charged artistic atmosphere of postmodernism, Bourgeois and Benglis created material-savvy sculptures more attune to messy abstraction and process-oriented gesture than to conceptual formalism. Their sculptural manifestations explored autobiographical experience and the female subject.
Though the two artists are 30 years apart in age—Bourgeois was born in 1911 and Benglis in 1941—their sculptures in the early 1970s have unexpected similarities. Both artists created organically-shaped, often grotesque amorphous forms. Both reference the undulating, layered landscape of the body and its private, internal anatomy while connecting to the ripe fecundity of the natural world, and the earth’s own internal brewing and bubbling.
More than 30 years later, their work provides reflection on our own cultural and political situation. Revisited, it still shocks and is charged with the energy of the artists’ physical manipulation of material and their intuitive, emotional and rebellious response to a burgeoning decade.
View images and read more about the exhibition here.