Raw Materials, Bristol

About

This exhibition at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery brought together works by four important post-war American artists who share a strong interest in the limits and capacities of language: Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer, Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Weiner.

Nauman employs puns and repetitions to reveal the gaps between speech and subjectivity; Holzer focuses closely on the language of officialdom; Ruscha makes typographical monuments in iconic American land- and cityscapes fusing pop iconography with a playful sense of irony; Weiner creates a sense of sculptural space with pared-down exhortations in text.

This exhibition presented iconic works of language-based art from the past fifty years in a manner that underlines one of ARTIST ROOMS' original aims, to communicate with audiences in meaningful and direct ways using contemporary media and materials outside of the traditional gallery system.