BRUCE NAUMAN DISAPPEARING ACTS

The exhibition is on view at The Museum of Modern Art through February 18

Bruce Bauman has spent half a century inventing forms to convey both the moral hazards and the thrill of being alive. Employing a tremendous range of materials and working methods, he reveals how mutable experiences of time, space, movement, and language provide an unstable foundation for understanding our place in the world. For Nauman, both making and looking at art involve “doing things that you don’t particularly want to do, putting yourself in unfamiliar situations, following resistances to find out why you’re resisting.”

Nauman’s art has always defied categorization. Delicate watercolors, flashing neon signs, sound installations, video corridors—he is constantly shifting between all these and more, never conforming to a signature style.

Disappearing Acts traces what Nauman has called “withdrawal as an art form”— both literal and figurative incidents of removal, deflection, and concealment. Bodies are fragmented, centers are left empty, voices emanate from hidden speakers, and the artist sculpts himself in absentia, appearing only as negative space.

The retrospective charts these forms of omission and loss across media and throughout the decades, following Nauman as he circles back to earlier concerns with new urgency. Presented in two complementary parts, at The Museum of Modern Art and MOMA PS1, this is the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work ever assembled.