3 Heads Fountain (3 Andrews)

The sculpture Three Heads Fountaine (Three Andrews) by Bruce Nauman, mid-way between poetry and morbidity, can make its viewer feel uncomfortable. Three identical, scar-covered male heads, fed water through a tube and pierced to create thin jets of water, are hung by the neck. Do these tubes bring to mind the apparatus through which a model breathes during the moulding of a sculpture, making them symbolic of sources of life, or do they evoke lethal injections, vectors of the dead?

Bruce Nauman regularly incorporates the human body into his work. Playing with the contradictions of human life (love and hate, life and death, pleasure and suffering), the renowned American artist, born in 1941, likes to subject his viewer to a physical and psychological test, at the same time as raising existential questions.

Three Heads Fountain (Three Andrews) by Bruce Nauman, part of the Pinault Collection, was displayed at the "Eloge du Doute" (“In Praise of Doubt”) exhibition at the Punta della Dogana in Venice (2011-2013).