Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain 1983

I can just picture Bruce Nauman there in his studio, wrestling with those neon tubes to make this ring of raw emotion. It's an alphabet soup of feelings. Neon, like paint, can be thick and thin. Here, those glowing colors bleed and buzz around each word like raw nerve endings. Life, death, love, hate, pleasure, pain – they're all entangled, almost tripping over each other. I can imagine Nauman thinking about how these words vibrate together, how they form this cycle of experience, and how you can't really pull them apart. I think about other word paintings, like those by Ed Ruscha or Christopher Wool, and I see how artists keep circling back to the same questions – what does it mean to communicate, to feel, to be human? It's this ongoing conversation that spans decades. We see the work, and in seeing, we feel it too.