Bruce Nauman deals with the big questions of life, in the words of his 1983 neon, “Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain.” Nauman’s work focuses on the essential elements of the human experience.

“Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light,” premiering at the Milwaukee Art Museum, January 28-April 9, is Nauman’s first solo exhibition in Wisconsin, the state in which he was raised. Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of America’s most innovative and provocative contemporary artists.

Nauman works in diverse media; this exhibition focuses solely on light. Light offered Nauman a medium that has the quality of being both elusive and effervescent while aggressively pervading an environment with its message.

Nauman’s art is motivated by ideas, not an attachment to a particular medium. Through the use of neon signs, a public and familiar means of communication to relate an idea, Nauman’s goal is to make the viewer think.

“This exhibition is all about the visitor’s experience,” said Joseph D. Ketner II, Milwaukee Art Museum chief curator and curator of the exhibition. “Visitors will walk into a darkened gallery full of neon signs and fluorescent light environments. They’ll experience a disorientation of light and space, just as Nauman intended.”

The exhibition is divided into three sections, split by two fluorescent light environments (a room and a corridor). The sections are early neons based on identity, word game neons and figurative neons. There are approximately 15 works in the exhibition.

The first section in the exhibition features Nauman’s early neons on the subject of identity. Working in his first professional studio, the neon beer signs in the shop fronts of his San Francisco neighborhood intrigued Nauman, who became determined to subvert the commercial purpose of the advertisements. In response, the artist created “Window or Wall Sign,” 1967, and hung it in the window of his storefront studio. With this piece he sought to achieve “an art that would kind of disappear – an art that was supposed to not quite look like art.”

Language, signs and symbols make up the second section. Nauman’s work in neon during the 1970s emphasizes the neon as a sign, presenting provocative twists of language. This series culminates in the monumental, billboard-scaled “One Hundred Live and Die,” 1984. His largest and most complex piece of neon, Nauman employs overwhelming scale to bombard the viewer with sardonic aphorisms.

In the third and final section of the exhibition, Nauman explores the pictographic potential of the medium for image-based signs. “Hanged Man,” 1985, makes a playful reference to the children’s word game while providing a biting criticism of human rights abuses then in South American and Southeast Asia. With these neons, Nauman acknowledges the great power of images to convey ideas.

The museum is at 700 North Art Museum Drive. For information, wwww.mam.org or 414-224-3200.