Two rooms featuring: Changing Light Corridor with Rooms, 1971; a floor installation with preparatory drawings, Enforced Perspective: Allegory and Symbolism, 1975; a unique neon piece, La Brea/Art Tips/Rat Spit/Tar Pits, 1972; two sculptures (Untitled (Hand Circle), 1996 and Partial Truth, 1997); a unique video piece, Raw Materials Washing Hands, 1996; and two further video works dated 1986 and 1999.

Since the mid 1960s Bruce Nauman has been one of the most highly respected and influential figures in contemporary art. He is noted for his toughness, his refusal to compromise, his exploratory way of working and his search for self-knowledge. His work combines bodily consciousness, physical activity, mental activity, linguistic manipulation and a good splash of humour. It also focuses on perception, spatial relationships, human psychology and issues of life and death (twenty of his sculptures refer to dying).

Early in his career he abandoned painting in favour of sculpture, performance, installation, film, video, photography and neon (amongst other activities). His restless intellect seems to drive a continual questioning experimentation and re-invention in his artistic practice.

The works in The d’Offay Donation cover nearly thirty years and a wide range of his work in different media. The unique early neon La Brea/Art Tips/Rat Spit/Tar Pits creates an anagrammatic play on the place name La Brea Tar Pits, a prehistoric site excavated in Los Angeles. It demonstrates Nauman’s interest in spacial and linguistic ambiguity. Changing Light Corridor with Rooms is one of many corridor works where psychology and physical matter interact. They involve and control the participating viewer and became increasingly complex and interactive.