Bruce Nauman: Neons Corridors Rooms

From September 15, 2022 to February 26, 2023, Pirelli HangarBicocca presents Neons Corridors Rooms, a major exhibition dedicated to Bruce Nauman (born Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1941; lives and works in New Mexico), one of the world’s most prominent living artists. Organized by Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, in collaboration with Tate Modern, London, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the show gathers thirty works created since the second half of the 1960s and focuses on the artist spatial research, exploring the most innovative dimension of his practice. In a career spanning over fifty years, Nauman has investigated the human condition and the deeper meaning of art-making, embracing a wide variety of different media—installation, video, sculpture, performance, photography, drawing, and sound—with a radical and pioneering attitude.

In addition to works presented in retrospectives in London (October 2020-February 2021) and Amsterdam (June-October 2021), Neons Corridors Rooms, curated by Roberta Tenconi and Vicente Todolí with Andrea Lissoni, Nicholas Serota, Leontine Coelewij, Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen and Katy Wan, also features a new selection of works that includes some of Nauman’s most representative installations. The exhibition in fact brings together for the first time the various types of corridors and rooms, along with six neon pieces, five video and sound works, and a selection of Tunnels, Nauman’s sculptural models for underground architecture. Spanning nearly four decades of research, the exhibition groups works following recurrent themes, thus highlighting on the one hand the variations and affinities among the different works, and on the other hand the artist’s extensive and continuous experimentation with architecture, light, sound, language and video.

Realized from the late 1960s, the corridors are structures designed by Bruce Nauman to manipulate, record, and challenge the viewer’s experience and movements within a space. Their architecture compels visitors to follow a path that is both physical and emotional, leading to a greater awareness of limitations and corporality. The exhibition outlines the early stages and development of this body of work, starting with the very first corridor created by the artist, Performance Corridor (1969). Besides, it investigates the different types of corridors that followed over the years, employing various shapes, sizes and modes of fruition. The complexity of these works have grown progressively, to the point of incorporating rooms and inserting sound, light, tactile, plastic or visual elements and devices, which alter the visitor’s perception and create a sense of disorientation. In Green Light Corridor (1970), for example, a green fluorescent light floods the narrow walkable space between  two 12 meters long walls, while in Corridor Installation with Mirror - San Jose Installation (Double Wedge Corridor with Mirror) (1970) Nauman uses a mirror to disorient visitors as they walk through it. Made in Milan in 1971 at the Françoise Lambert Gallery, and reconstructed here for the first time, Funnel Piece (Françoise Lambert Installation) (1971) harnesses natural light as a generative factor in experience. The show also includes a new reconfiguration of the audio installation Raw Materials (2004), originally conceived for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern and presented now outdoors, along the Pirelli HangarBicocca building, as a kind of intangible corridor formed solely by sound.

The catalogue
Published in conjunction with the exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, the monograph presents the most up to date studies on Nauman’s spatial and architectural research, focusing on his neons, corridors and room installations. By analyzing and shedding light on the conceptual developments, formal variations and endless experimentations, the publication includes newly commissioned essays by scholars, conservators and curators Francesca Esmay, Joan Simon and Gloria Sutton. Together with a text by the exhibition curators highlighting the specificity of the exhibition that for the first time convey such body of work in its entirety, the volume is accompanied by specific entries for the thirty works on display, each containing a selection of historical visual apparatus and ephemera, and written by curators, scholars, and researchers from international institutions. The book is also illustrated by a rich photographic documentation of such iconic works gathered at Pirelli HangarBicocca for the first time in an encompassing show.

Neons Corridors Rooms is also supported by TERRA Foundation for American Art.
With special thanks to Sperone Westwater, New York, Nauman’s primary representation, where he has shown since 1976.

The exhibition program
Neons Corridors Rooms is part of the 2022–2023 exhibition program, conceived by Artistic Director Vicente Todolí in collaboration with the curatorial department: Roberta Tenconi, Curator; Lucia Aspesi, Assistant Curator; Fiammetta Griccioli, Assistant Curator. The program continues, in the Navate space, with the exhibitions Ann Veronica Janssens (April 6 to July 30, 2023); and James Lee Byars (October 12, 2023 to February 18, 2024). The Shed space hosts Dineo Seshee Bopape (October 6, 2022 to January 29, 2023); Gian Maria Tosatti (February 23 to July 30, 2023); and Thao Nguyen Phan (September 14, 2023 to February 14, 2024).