Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana presents to the public the great and eagerly awaited exhibition dedicated to Bruce Nauman (1941, Indiana, USA) from 23 May 2021 to 9 January 2022 at Punta della Dogana.

"Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies", curated by Carlos Basualdo, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Caroline Bourgeois, curator at the Pinault Collection, pays homage to one of the most significant personalities of the international contemporary art scene, focusing on three fundamental lines of his production: the artist's studio as a space for work and creation, the per- formative use of the body and sound experimentation.

From the 1960s to today, Bruce Nauman has explored different artistic languages, from photography to performance, from sculpture to video, experimenting with their conceptual potential and investigating the very definition of artistic practice.

Winner of the Leone d'Oro for the best national participation in the Venice Biennale in 2009, celebrated in recent years by numerous and important retrospectives, the artist for the first time presents an unpublished exhibition itinerary at Punta della Dogana, able to shedding new light on its own production, alongside more recent historical works, some of which are unpublished or exhibited for the first time in Europe.

The exhibition was conceived as an organic composition that reflects on the artist's works and facilitates the intuitive understanding of his practice starting from the Contrapposto series through an exhibition itinerary that traces the founding themes of Nauman's work: sound, performance, study, the relationship between the body and the space or spaces it occupies, physical, psychological, cultural.

At the center of the investigation of the exhibition is the series of video installations created by the artist in recent years starting from the reinterpretation of one of the first works in which Nauman experimented with the use of moving images, the famous Walk with Contrapposto by 1968, which portrayed him advancing along a wooden corridor set up in his study as he struggled to maintain the chiastic pose.