Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman (born 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana) is one of the most influential American artists of the past sixty years, and has lived and worked on a cattle ranch outside Galisteo, New Mexico, since the early 1980s. His presence in the Southwest art world is significant precisely because it is so understated - Nauman does not participate in the regional gallery scene, does not court local attention, and generally prefers the isolation of the high desert to any kind of art-world sociability. But his choice to live and work in New Mexico has shaped the culture of the broader community simply by demonstrating that the most serious kind of artistic practice can happen far from any city. His work defies easy summary. It spans neon sculpture, video installation, performance, drawing, sound work, photography, cast objects, and architectural intervention - and across all of these forms, it consistently returns to a set of obsessions: the limits of language, the awkwardness of the body, the nature of repetition and duration, and the strange position of the artist in relation to an audience. Works like "One Hundred Live and Die" (1984), "Clown Torture" (1987), and "Mapping the Studio" (2001) are as likely to be disturbing as they are illuminating, drawing on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and the expansive, uncomfortable silences of ranch life. Nauman has been awarded virtually every significant honor in contemporary art: the Praemium Imperiale in 2004, the Wolf Prize, the Max Beckmann Prize, the Nasher Prize in 2018. His 2009 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was a landmark event. His work is in the permanent collections of virtually every major museum in the world. He remains, despite all of this, quietly at work in Galisteo - and the fact that the New Mexico high desert can sustain that kind of practice, and that kind of artist, says something important about the region. Nauman's choice to live and work in New Mexico has made Galisteo and the surrounding high desert a place of pilgrimage for artists and curators who make the journey to the Southwest partly in homage to his presence there. The commercial market for his work is among the most significant in contemporary art, with editions and unique works achieving major prices at the leading auction houses and through his long-term gallery relationships. His work is in the permanent collections of virtually every major museum in the world. For New Mexico, his presence is significant not as a market driver in the regional sense but as a demonstration that the most ambitious kind of artistic seriousness is possible in the high desert, far from any city, sustained by the landscape and the solitude that the Southwest uniquely offers to those who choose it deliberately.