As Bruce Nauman’s exclusive European representative, Konrad Fischer Galerie is honored to present the artist’s 20th exhibition with the gallery, marking a historic continuity that began with his seminal first solo exhibition, Six Sound Problems for Konrad Fischer, in 1968.
Along with numerous new sculptures and drawings, the exhibition presents for the first time the new 3D video installation Beckett's Chair Portrait Rotated (2025). This unique work is referring to Nauman’s life-long engagement with the work of Irish poet, playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett. The obsessive, sometimes absurd behavior of Beckett’s protagonists and their seemingly endless repetitions of rituals and special activities have influenced and inspired the artist since his early video work Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) in 1968. Simple, redundant activities – steps, walks, movements – turn into a piece, forming an immersive video environment. The artist’s body is the raw material for his seemingly never-ending exercises and actions.
Building on an idea developed by his long-time assistants and friends Bruce Hamilton and Susanna Carlisle—who devised a way to create stereoscopic video effects using two iPhones—Nauman revisits his Beckett Walk. Supported by a simple chair, he performs the piece while the video plays in extreme slow motion, the image rotated 90 degrees, and the sound drastically slowed down. Lasting nearly an hour, the work requires 3D glasses, drawing viewers into an uncanny experience: as if transported into the artist’s studio, they drift through space weightlessly.
Bruce Nauman has repeatedly made not only his body, and in particular his hands, the object of his work but also bodies and body fragments of skinned animals like deer, foxes, caribou or coyotes, often using taxidermy moulds to create eerie-seeming hybrid forms in anatomically incorrect positions.
In his new installation Fish/rainbow (2025), this exploration of corporeality and transformation takes on a different register. Here, Nauman juxtaposes a large-scale floor piece—a spiraling, vividly colored school of wax fish—with a video projection of a rainbow, filmed from a color photograph. The shifting rainbow light seems to echo across the multicolored casts of the fishes, creating a dialogue between natural form, artificial material, and spectral illusion.
Fish first appeared in Nauman’s work in Fishing for an Asian Carp (1966), and later resurfaced in his large-scale installation One Hundred Fish Fountain (2005), composed of bronze casts of freshwater fish connected by plastic tubes and pumps. The recurring motif draws on the artist’s memories of long fishing trips with his father, weaving autobiographical elements into his practice while also probing deeper questions about the ontological divide between humans and animals—perpetrators and victims, hunters and prey, fishermen and their catch—within Nauman’s visual and intellectual universe.
Alongside this installation, a series of new bronze, wax and plaster cast sculptures is suspended from the ceiling. These works depict catfish skulls and packrat-gnawed fish carcasses, at times combined with human heads, all dangling from wire strings or paired with simple tools such as a hammer.
These motifs extend directly into Nauman’s recent drawings, executed over the last two years, which mark a return to one of the most essential aspects of his practice: the continuous presence of drawing throughout every stage of creation. In this exhibition, the drawings echo his sculptural investigations of cast fish skulls and bodies, capturing them in various states of decay and destruction. Through this act of drawing, Nauman seems to grapple with the forms and objects before his hands and eyes, as if using the medium itself to comprehend the fragile, shifting world he renders.
Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941, Bruce Nauman received his BS from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1964) and his MFA from the University of California, Davis (1966).
Recent solo exhibitions include Contrapposto Studies at Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, Venice (2021-22); SITE Santa Fe, NM (2023); and Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2024). Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts, a comprehensive retrospective, debuted at Schaulager, Basel (2018) and traveled to MoMA The Museum of Modern Art, New York and MoMA P.S.1 (2018-19). In 2020, Tate Modern in London presented a survey that traveled to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2021); M Woods, Beijing (2022); and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2022-23).
Since his first solo gallery show in 1966, Nauman has been the subject of numerous surveys and retrospectives at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum (1972-73); Whitechapel Art Gallery, Kunsthalle Basel and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1986-87); and Walker Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Kunsthaus Zurich (1993-95). Other important solo exhibitions have been presented at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (2004); the Berkeley Art Museum, Castello di Rivoli and the Menil Collection (2007-08); and Fondation Cartier (2015), at Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden / Cragg Foundation, Wuppertal (2015) and at Skulpturenhalle Neuss / Thomas Schütte Foundation (2020).
Nauman has received numerous awards including the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts (1993), the Wexner Prize (1994), the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), the Praemium Imperiale (2004) and the Frederick Kiesler Prize (2014). Nauman represented the United States at the 2009 Venice Biennale; the pavilion was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.
Photos © Roman März
