BERKELEY, CA.- The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) is proud to present A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, a major exhibition of early work by Bruce Nauman, one of the most influential artists working today. The exhibition is the first ever to focus on the years Nauman lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and features the full range of his work from the 1960s, when he laid the foundation for all of his subsequent, ground-breaking work in sculpture, performance, and film and video art.

Curated by Constance Lewallen, BAM/PFA senior curator, the exhibition will provide new research and insight into a vital early stage of Nauman's career. Featured in the exhibition will be more than 100 works -- several of which have never been exhibited before -- including drawings, sculpture, neon reliefs, photographs, films, videos, sound and text works, installations, artist books, and ephemera. A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s will be on view at BAM/PFA from Wednesday, January 17 through Sunday, April 15, 2007, before touring Europe and the United States.

"We are pleased and honored to be presenting this important and unprecedented exploration of a truly original artist and thinker," says Kevin E. Consey, BAM/PFA director. "The museum's history of focusing on Bay Area and Conceptual art makes us well positioned to develop such a major re-examination of Nauman's early career."

Nauman is widely regarded as being among the most important living American artists. Over the past four decades, his work has remained constant in its explorations and, at the same time, varied in its scope. Nauman's work employs forms that range from Post-Minimalism and Conceptual art to film and video and installation art, through which a series of themes and ideas consistently appear: the use of the body as a material; the integration of art and language; the relationship of art and architecture; and such dichotomies as concealment and revelation, interior and exterior, and positive and negative space, among others.

Calling Nauman's work "more pertinent than ever," the New York Times recently stated: "A pioneer in Post-Minimalist video and performance art, and a sculptor of seemingly limitless versatility, Mr. Nauman has been famous and critically admired since he arrived on the scene… and his work has exerted an important influence on contemporary art ever since."

Nauman spent his formative years in Northern California -- first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, from 1964 to 1966, and then in San Francisco as a working artist and part-time instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute -- before departing for Southern California in late 1969. Nauman began his artistic career as a painter, but soon branched out into more conceptual forms, bypassing the dominant formalism of Pop Art and Minimalism.

During this early period Nauman began making sculpture in clay, fiberglass and polyester resin, and other non-traditional materials. He created casts of negative space and parts of his own body, incorporated neon tubes into sculptures, and made his now-familiar neon reliefs. In 1966, he created his first sculpture using words (a lead plaque inscribed A Rose Has No Teeth), forecasting his career-long fascination with word play and the relationship between art and language.

At this stage Nauman created virtually all of his landmark early films and videos; he was among the first artists ever to include video works in a gallery exhibition. Nauman also made his first photographs, experimented with sound works and holography, using his own body as a subject, and -- toward the end of the decade -- developed his first interactive video corridors.

In each of these areas, he demonstrated an intelligence and originality that made curators and dealers take notice. By 1970, Nauman was represented by galleries in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Düsseldorf. He was included in all of the seminal anti-form and Conceptual exhibitions, such as Eccentric Abstraction (1966), When Attitudes Become Form (1969), Prospect 68 (1968), and 9 at Castelli (1969). In 1972, a survey of his work was presented at the Los Angeles County and Whitney Museums, an unusual tribute to such a young artist.

A Rose Has No Teeth provides an unprecedented investigation of Nauman's career, influences, and contributions to contemporary art, adding to scholarship on both the artist and a particularly fruitful and influential period in American art history. While preparing the exhibition, Lewallen interviewed more than forty of Nauman's associates from his early period. Her research also uncovered new works by Nauman, including a group of twenty-five drawings, a fiberglass sculpture kept for years by a classmate and forgotten by the artist himself, and a series of four films. Conversations between Lewallen and photographer Jack Fulton, who collaborated with Nauman in the 1960s, helped uncover a cache of photo outtakes (stored for years in Fulton's basement) from the 1970 screen print series Studies for Holograms. Fulton also found several shots he took of Nauman in his San Francisco studio, which will be featured in the catalogue.

Lewallen has devoted much of her career to developing exhibitions of the Conceptual, multimedia, video, and performance art that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, and, as MATRIX curator and then senior curator at BAM/PFA, she has often focused on Bay Area artists. Her recent exhibition projects include The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951 - 1982) (2001), Everything Matters: Paul Kos (2003), and Ant Farm 1968 - 1978 (2004).