For his twentieth exhibition with Konrad Fischer Galerie, Bruce Nauman turned his own history into the subject for new work. The line drawings, sculptural installations and mobiles, and a video were all made in the past three years, demonstrating that Nauman is still actively exploring relations between form, materials, and chance with his characteristically dark undertone. At first, they felt more sentimental than earlier ones by Nauman, but that feeling eroded as we came to understand how Nauman was subverting our expectations about his art.
The heart of the exhibition was Beckett’s Chair Portrait Rotated, 2025, a 3D video referencing Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), 1968. This nearly hour-long slow-motion video shows the artist moving a chair around his studio, similarly to how he had moved his own angled body in the earlier work. The video is projected on the wall with the image rotated ninety degrees so that Nauman appears parallel to the floor of the gallery, giving the viewer an unusual perspective on the action. In contrast to many of Nauman’s prior video works, typically displayed on small monitors, which can jar viewers and separate them from the artist, Beckett’s Chair is a large-scale projection that invites the viewer into Nauman’s studio. Low-tech 3D glasses render the image jumpily and add to the uncanny nature of the work—an effect that is also heightened by the sound of the chair scraping across the floor. By expanding the work to the scale of the studio, Nauman simultaneously brought himself into the exhibition and invited the viewer into the site of his artistic creation.
The exhibition concluded with the large-scale installation Fish/rainbow, 2025, a spiraling school of 120 multicolored twisting and diving wax fish set in front of a rainbow. The projected image of the rainbow was made by moving a camera over a photograph, bringing something fixed to life. This aesthetically pleasing and optimistic installation could be read as a sign that the famously recalcitrant Nauman is softening in his old age. But this congenial appearance falls apart when Fish/rainbow is considered in dialogue with 2 bronze heads hung with bundled damaged or packrat chewn wax fish, 2025, hanging nearby. The mobile alludes to earlier sculptures by Nauman that integrated hanging molds of animal carcasses with architectural elements. The work is similarly gruesome, the wax fish are fleshy and bloody in color as if they had been skinned, and there is a distinctive rawness to the upside-down cast-bronze heads. The work references Nauman’s own artworks and an art-historical lineage spanning from Roman funereal masks to Alexander Calder’s mobiles. One of the bronze heads even sticks his tongue out. Nauman pokes fun at the idea that he might be thinking about his own mortality through these works. He may indeed be, but he’s laughing at us trying to consider him as anything but an artist insistent on being impenetrable to the end.
