Bruce Nauman "Diamond Mind Circle of Tears Fallen All Around Me (1975)"

Peter Freeman

poster for Bruce Nauman "Diamond Mind Circle of Tears Fallen All Around Me (1975)"

This event has ended.

Peter Freeman, Inc. presents an historical installation by Bruce Nauman. First shown in Düsseldorf at Konrad Fischer Gallery in 1975, and presented at the S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actual Kunst), Gent, in 1992, this will be a rare public viewing of this major work and the first in the United States.

Diamond Mind Circle of Tears Fallen All Around Me (1975) consists of six sandstone blocks, each roughly 15 inches cubed, distributed in a concentric circle. The blocks' rhomboid shapes produce an unusual sense of dislocation, as if the room itself were slightly askew. In the mid 1970s Nauman created a series of 7 installations with rhomboid cubes that explore the complexities of perception. In works like Forced Perspective I (1975; Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany) and Consummate Mask of Rock (1975; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), as well as this piece, Nauman presents a minimal art gone awry.

In Diamond Mind Circle of Tears All Around Me, Nauman subverts the strict geometries of Minimalism through his subtle shifting of the square form, and complements the phenomenological experience of Minimalist installations with a psychological dimension. With the poetic, almost Surrealist, title, the cubes begin to suggest a circle of human emotion, of "tears fallen all around me."

In addition to the sculpture, the exhibition includes the large diagramatic drawing by Nauman for the installation. Michael Auping, the Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, emphasizes in his essay "Projection and Displacement" that:

Of all the types of drawings Nauman has done for different mediums, his drawings for installations are particularly interesting […because] they reveal, perhaps more than any other type, how Nauman thinks his way not simply into sculpture but into the peculiar kind of space his installations present.

Bruce Nauman, who has just been selected to represent the United States in the American Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), is among the most important living American artists. Over the past four decades Nauman's work has employed Post-Minimalist and Conceptual strategies in a variety of mediums including sculpture, video, film, and performance. His most recent solo exhibitions include the travelling retrospective "A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s" initiated at the University of California, Berkeley, and "Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light" at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Nauman was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He lives and works in New Mexico.

Media

Schedule

from January 15, 2009 to February 21, 2009

Artist(s)

Bruce Nauman

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