“Bruce Nauman is one of the most important artists of the 21st century, an artist known for his prolific work across various mediums such as performance, sculpture, drawing, video, installation, and sound. But, he never explored painting,” artist Stefan Brüggemann tells me. We are discussing the two-person exhibition between Brüggemann and Nauman titled Painting Not Painting at Gathering in Ibiza. “I found this intriguing, leading me to consider what it means to paint in a contemporary context—the idea of painting not painting.” Bringing together painting, lithograph prints and sculpture, Painting Not Painting presents an intergenerational dialogue between Brüggemann and Nauman that explores the notion of what it means to paint today. It is unsurprising that Brüggemann seeks to draw from Nauman’s vast and varied artistic oeuvre, which spans more than five decades, to explore this question. With his spirit of irreverence and defiance against tradition, Brüggemann does not use oil or acrylic paint. Instead he uses inkjet prints, digital mediums, spray paint, wood, aluminium and gold leaf. In Painting Not Painting, both Nauman and Brüggemann employ devices such as temporal layering, texture and subverted functionalism to replace formal qualities of painting.
Entering the exhibition, it is clear that both artists engage deeply with the complexities of language, repetition, text, and meaning. Wordplay and humour are present in many of the works: one of Brüggemann’s text-based canvases reads, “I know how to satisfy my wife in bed. Get out of the bed.” One lithograph by Nauman titled Ah Ha (1975), creates a visual chiasmus by intertwining the two verbs on opposing black and white backgrounds. There is also a playful interaction with signs and symbols. In one large-scale canvas painting by Brüggemann, a black equals sign is spray-painted onto a silver leaf backdrop. Another lithograph by Nauman features the boldly scrawled, spiralling word “NO” (1981). Describing works like this one, Nauman stated, “[in] certain cases, some of the word prints become objects. When that happens, they get very close to being signs you could hang on the wall—just like that exit sign over there.” Both Brüggemann and Nauman’s paradoxical and playful compositions seek to tease the viewer, to subvert them, mixing inaccessibility and accessibility, meaning and dissolution. Painting Not Painting deconstructs our habitual understanding of language and signs.
One of the most engaging aspects of Nauman’s work is his use of the human body as both medium and subject. Art historian Constance M. Lewallen wrote extensively on the body as central to Nauman’s work, noting that even his installations find their origins in performance. The idea of live performance occurred to Nauman during his first semester as a teaching assistant to Wayne Thiebaud at the University of California, where he thought it was nonsensical that students would sit in a circle and do life-drawing classes. For Nauman, it made sense to use his own body as a material. His seminal work Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68), is a video performance that features the artist engaging in a repetitive, deliberately exaggerated movement around the edges of a square. The performance is an exploration of space, movement, and the body’s role in experiencing art.
Investigating painting through the prism of Nauman’s concept of the body, whether it is the actual body or the absence of the body, serves a double purpose as it takes into consideration how the audience engages with the work. Much of the force of Painting Not Painting resides in the subversion of the audience’s habitual expectations of the function of objects. Merleau-Ponty described how our understanding of how things function is derived from our bodily experience of the world: “We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use. We become used to think that all this exists necessarily and unshakably.”
For Brüggemann, too, the interplay of the known and the unknown is central to his work. He says, “Regarding the known and unknown, for me, it is more important that my work acts as a generator of doubt [...]” Language, media, and contemporary culture is used throughout Brüggemann’s use of text, mixed media, and appropriation to challenge the viewer to confront the chiasms inherent in modern communication and societal norms. He describes the quotes in his works as “an appropriation [...] a ready-made language.” This approach is evident in his series Headlines and Last Lines in the Movies where he spray paints the last lines of dramatic films juxtaposed with headlines from the news at the time of painting, in order for the work to be “affected by the context [in which] it is made.” Whilst in Ibiza, I visited Brüggemann’s studio and residency space, a Brutalist-like building designed by Alberto Kalach, situated in the centre of the island. Inside the main living space, the walls are covered with the artist’s gold leaf text works, with a soundtrack of Iggy Pop, a friend and collaborator, reading Brüggemann’s text plays. Ahead of the Painting Not Painting exhibition, he covered the entire house in aluminium silver leaf. Brüggemann discusses how gold oscillates between being a symbol of economic power and spiritual significance. Moving through the gallery space, light casts shimmering reflections across the gold leaf canvas, obscuring the relief-texts. The texts are taken from sentences we might encounter in our fast-paced digital lives, which Brüggemann has shortened and presented as poems; a sharp critique of modernity and the digital age.
Brüggemann’s use of text also highlights the limitations and possibilities of language and abstraction. He asserts, “Words express what abstraction cannot and abstraction expresses what words cannot.” This duality is evident in his work, where text and visual elements often complement and contrast each other, a useful comment on the interplay between media, reality, and fiction. One of Brüggemann’s works in the exhibition is titled Untitled (Cartoon Painting), an appropriation of an Ad Reinhardt cartoon from the 1950s, where the text “What does this represent?” “What do YOU represent?” is repeated to the point of illegibility. Brüggemann explains, “The cartoon painting is an appropriation of an Ad Reinhardt cartoon he made in the 50’s defending the criticism of abstract expressionism. It draws to my attention how this joke is still relevant when it comes to conceptual and contemporary art.” This work exemplifies Brüggemann’s approach to art—using humour and historical references to critique and comment on the ongoing debates within the art world.
Staging an intergenerational dialogue between Brüggemann and Nauman, the exhibition centres on the interplay of text, image, and meaning. Both artists utilise language, playing with its presentation and form, and eventually liberating it from the constraints of fixed meanings and opening a space for new interpretations and conversations. They dissolve straightforward distinctions between meaning and dissolution, perception and reality, embodying the conditions of perception of the world, and thus anchor the body—and the interchange of bodies—as the site(s) through which phenomenological systems can take place. The subject and the object; the body and the world—these are separate entities that are recognisable by themselves, but in order for these entities to recognise each other they must be in a constant exchange. Nauman and Brüggemann demonstrate that to paint today is to engage with a spectrum of mediums and ideas, blurring boundaries between different forms of art and inviting viewers into a dynamic, interactive process. Consequently, the exhibition Painting Not Painting at Gathering in Ibiza transcends a mere display of artworks; it serves as a dialogue on the evolution of painting in the contemporary era, emphasising the significance of interactivity, embodiment, and conceptual depth in modern artistic practices.
