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 varied practice — spanning neon sculpture, video, performance, drawing, sound installation, and cast work — consistently interrogates the limits of language, the body, and the premise of art-making itself. Works like "One Hundred Live and Die" (1984), "Clown Torture" (1987), and "Mapping the Studio" (2001) are as likely to be unsettling as they are illuminating, drawing on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, physical comedy, and the expansive silences of ranch life. Though largely invisible in the Galisteo community, his presence has shaped the New Mexico art world's sense of what it means to work seriously at the periphery. His 2009 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was a landmark event in American art. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in 2004 and the Nasher Prize in 2018.