Bruce Nauman: Dream Passage

This summer, the National galerie in Hamburger Bahnhof is presenting Bruce Nauman, Dream Passage, the first major exhibition of the US American artist Bruce Nauman in Berlin. The exhibition is being held on the occasion of the installation of the spectacular architectural sculpture Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care from 1984, which was recently donated to the Nationalgalerie by the collector Friedrich Christian Flick. Thus the largest interior sculpture by the artist can now be exhibited in a permanent space, accompanying Double Cage Piece (1974), which has been exhibited in the exterior space of the Hamburger Bahnhof since 2005, and also comes from the generous donation by the collector. Close cooperation with the artist meant that this work, extreme in every meaning of the word, could be installed on a permanent basis in Hall 5 of the Rieckhallen. The sculpture is made of three intersecting corridors, and can be entered; it is without doubt the high point of a series of works called Dream Passage which was inspired by a dream of the artist.

An exceptional presentation of some outstanding examples of the artist’s ‘experience architecture’ will be on show in the central hall of the museum. At the end of the 1960s, Nauman began constructing corridors and spaces that could be entered by visitors and which evoked the experience of being locked in, of being abandoned and of spatial uncertainty. The complex work Corridor Installation (Nick Wilder Installation) from 1970, where visitors are recorded by a video camera and then confronted with their own image, will also be exhibited. Corridor with Mirror and White Lights (1971) cannot be entered. Nevertheless, this work evokes the impression of the viewer getting closer to his or her own reflection in the mirror.