A Show With No Missteps: Bruce Nauman’s ‘No Mistakes’
With his ‘blind drawings’ at Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer, New York, the artist answers the question: ‘How do I draw?’
Sketched by the artist with his eyes closed, the drawings in Bruce Nauman’s ‘No Mistakes’ at Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer in New York goad the viewer into seeking recognizable forms among chaotic scribbles. Elongated columns in works like Untitled (Eyes Closed Still Life) conjure candles and vases, while the softly angled triangles and recessed hollows in self-portraits such as Untitled (Profile Twice) (both 2025) recall the features of a face. More difficult to parse are the drawings of catfish skulls (such as Untitled [Eyes Closed Catfish Skull], 2026). They are mostly entropic masses, with nary a legible marking to be found.
Humour has underpinned Nauman’s practice for over half a century, and so it is tempting to read the skull idiomatically, as a playful nod to the online phenomenon of individuals creating fake personae to deceive, or ‘catfish’, others. In ichthyology, the catfish is colloquially called the ‘crucifix fish’ because of its skull’s eerie resemblance to Christ on the cross. It is a classic example of what psychologists term pareidolia: the human tendency to find meaning within nebulous visual stimuli.
Yet Nauman’s ‘blind drawings’ are more than just postmodern Rorschach tests. They are also born of his decades-long endeavour to examine the mechanics of both art-making and everyday actions. A single question, inspired by a conversation with the painter Eric Fischl, prompts this new body of work: ‘How do I draw?’ First, Nauman internalizes an object in his mind’s eye, then he replicates it in metalpoint on paper primed with thick layers of tinted ground or chalkboard paint. The resulting pieces are less representational images, more documentations of process – of drawing, yes, but also the process of memory, of how passing time warps the mental pictures we vainly try to hold.
Hence, perhaps, the catfish cranium that serves as the show’s primary motif. Mythologized by the cosmopolitan art world as a recalcitrant cowboy, Nauman grew up fishing and hunting in the Midwest. Scrawled on paper, the piscine skulls become portals to the 84-year-old’s childhood. While Nauman has always been interested in the phenomenology of time, here he turns his attention to time’s ravages. Contradictions lace our understanding of his scribbles: they resemble at once the joyous markings of a child who has taken a crayon to the walls of his family home, and black holes collapsing in upon themselves.
Nauman provokes us to draw our own associations, and in his drawings I can’t help but see traces of Cy Twombly – who, lacking access to an ancient Greece lost to history, evoked the energy of the Trojan War through circling torrents of crayon and graphite (Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978). Like Nauman, Twombly was an imposingly tall presence, slow and measured in speech. Unlike Twombly, Nauman has repeatedly made his body a medium in his work, as in the film Walk with Contrapposto (1968).
‘No Mistakes’ follows this path. At the exhibition’s centre are two wall-sized projections of slowed-down footage of Nauman drawing in his studio. The second is a static, five-hour supercut of 15 videos shot in 2026, while the first rotates daily through 27 videos taken between 2025 and 2026. A 20-minute work titled No. 20, Self Portrait West Wall Smudge Prominent Eyes Closed (2025) played when I visited. Hovering in and out of the lower left corner is the artist’s balding head. His hair, once a thick golden brown, is now white and wiry. Like the Christ-like catfish skull, it uncannily recalls another object on-screen: the spindly curves that Nauman has etched into the primed paper using his metal-tipped styli. To interpret this as a show about ageing and mortality might be to err. But the title also suggests that there are no missteps.
Bruce Nauman’s ‘No Mistakes’ is on view at Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer, New York until 20 June 2026
