Bruce Nauman

Sperone Westwater, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above circa 1996

Bruce Nauman’s body of work is one of the most challenging and influential oeuvres of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Defying categorization, Nauman has explored a variety of subjects in a wide array of media – from paint to sculpture to performance to video to installation. As with all of Nauman’s work, it is important to approach any object, from the very beginning, as the product of an investigative activity; one that gives concrete form to a question or idea of political or social import.

All Thumbs is a unique sculpture, executed in phosphorus bronze that continues Nauman’s fascination with hands: a subject which has captivated the artist for nearly forty years. Here, the hands of the artist are presented on a base, dislocated from the body, so that they take on an entirely different status than that of physical extremities. The viewer engages with them as ‘objects’, and meditates on the physical as well as intellectual dialogue between the two. Now, the hands become curious objects in themselves, but also, separated from their ‘host’, these hands, like Samuel Beckett’s characters from Waiting For Godot, Vladimir and Estragon, seem lost on stage: disconnected from everything else, yet fused together in their seeming abandon.

Interestingly, as the title suggests, these hands each possess five thumbs, as opposed to four fingers and a thumb. This continues the artist’s estrangement of the subject. Hands with five thumbs cannot operate as hands are meant to: one cannot grip, for example. This makes redundant the artist’s means of creation and, yet, of course, through the casting process, Nauman has used his very own hands to create this wonderful sculpture.