SITE SANTA FE presents His Mark, Bruce Nauman’s first solo exhibition in New Mexico which will include new and recent video installation, 3D video, and self-portrait work which has never been exhibited before. Since the 1960s, Bruce Nauman’s work has questioned the very nature of what constitutes art and being an artist. He is known for making his body—his hands in particular—the object of his work and a tool for exploring the relationship between language and meaning.

His Mark explores spaces between the intimate and the historical through the 3D video installation His Mark(2021) and two related works, the single-channel video projection Practice (2022) and the single-channel 3D video projection Spider (2021). The reoccurring X gesture echoed in each work has nuanced autobiographical and historical origins. Inspired in part by Treaty 7, a controversial 1877 land treaty between the Canadian government and Isapo-Muxika, the chief of the Siksika peoples at that time, Nauman’s somber, repetitious gesture underscores the mournful implications of loss and subtly signifies its rippling impact.

Shown alongside this series is a new work, Self Portrait at 80 (2022). Nauman often returns to earlier works or materials, recontextualizing or reconfiguring them, and in the process arrives at new meanings. Self Portrait at 80, shown publicly for the first time in this exhibition, repurposes the 2018 video Walking a Line. For this new iteration, Nauman reverses all the parameters: the color is removed, the motion is reversed but the soundtrack is not, and the projected 3D image is flipped back-to-front and front-to-back. The result is an inversion of the spatial relationships among the objects pictured: the artist amidst various items in his studio, a perennial Nauman subject.

Thank You!

Support for His Mark is generously provided by
SITE SANTA FE Board of Directors
SITE SANTA FE Annual Exhibition Fund
Jackie and Irving Blum
Bobbie Foshay
Maria and Ed Gale
Gale Family Foundation
Diane and Werner Grob
Agnes Gund
Jeanne and Mickey Klein
Helen Kornblum
Nina Zingale and Jerry Meyer
Barbara and Michael Ogg
Christophe A Olson Roebling Endowment & Josed Granados
Angela Westwater
Rosina Yue
Special thanks to Juliet Myers and Bruce Nauman Studio,Chelsea Weathers, Angela Westwater, Sperone Westwater, Bruce Hamilton and Susanna Carlisle, and Benjamin Kidwell Lein.
Additional funding is provided by the City of Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax.