Bruce Nauman, now 83, has been the subject of over 250 solo exhibitions across the globe. This new show, at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Los Angeles, goes back to the beginning, focusing on a crucial period in the artist’s creative growth—his decade in Los Angeles. Nauman and his family moved to Pasadena in 1969, when he was 27. His process there, he has said, was “what an artist does when left alone in the studio. My conclusion was that [if ] I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.” The exhibition presents sketches, sculptures, videos, and more from a concentrated yet crucial era of Nauman’s life. Highlights include a rare set of performance instructions hung alongside Performance Corridor (1969), a prop-turned-sculpture used in Nauman’s earliest video works, and the conversion of the gallery’s main space into two large installations. —Lucy Horowitz