Bruce Nauman
Wolf Prize Laureate in Arts 1993
Bruce Nauman
Award citation:
“for distinguished work as a sculptor and his extraordinary contribution to twentieth century art”.
Prize share:
None
The Wolf Prize is awarded to Bruce Nauman in recognition of the range and quality of his art evident in his work as a sculptor of great originality, imagination, wit, and moral power.
Bruce Nauman (born in 1941, USA) expanded his artistic horizons under the guidance of William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson while studying art at the University of California, Davis, from 1965 to 1966. Nauman initially engaged in painting but shifted his focus to sculpture, performance art, and cinema collaborations with William Allan and Robert Nelson in 1964.Throughout his career, Nauman worked as an assistant to Wayne Thiebaud and held teaching positions at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968 and the University of California at Irvine in 1970, following the completion of his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1966.
Starting with his ground-breaking sculptural installations of the late 1960s and continuing up to his current work, Nauman has been an audacious artist, exploring complex human emotional and psychological states while examining the very premises of art-making itself. Using media as varied as paper, steel, cast bronze, industrial machine elements, video, film, neon signage, holography, and standard photography, Nauman has never settled into the false comfort of signature style or a standard working methodology. His consistent investigation of language and ideas has always meshed with his unorthodox relation to materials and a strong sense of humor. While Nauman seriously examines issues of art´s ontological structures, his art has always retained its distinct power as an immediate experience.
Clearly acknowledged as one of the leading sculptors of his generation, he remains uniquely important to younger artists, and unaffected by his centrality. Even though his vocabulary is now firmly established, his new work remains as fresh and undaunted as the first works which brought him to the attention of American and European artists, collectors, curators and critics in the 1960s.
