Lary Bell

“Everything is an experiment, a lesson, evidence of the investigation, nothing more or less.”
Larry Bell

Bell’s career has spanned 60 years, but throughout he has focused on light and the interface of surface. A tireless experimenter, his methodology is characterized by spontaneity, intuition and improvisation evidenced in works that ranged from the small scale to total environments and large installations.

Bell began his career in the 1960s as a painter but soon made constructions and then sculpture. It was through his sculptural practice that he discovered an industrial metallic plating process that produced gradient coated glass, paper and plastic surfaces, a process that could virtually create virtual spatial volume and translucency of an object. This technique, which Bell continues to explore today led him to create his key works, such as the signature glass ‘Cube’ and ‘Standing Walls’ which also utilizes this process.

Bell’s series of collages on various papers play with ideas of perception and notions of spatial ambiguity. Bell refers to the language of Cubism in these works – in particular to its dynamic such as mylar, handmade papers and laminating film.  While the works are purely abstract and two-dimensional, their forms reflect surfaces crating a shimmering vortex of depth and light, emitting a rainbow of colors that is made visible through the interference of light at various wavelengths hitting the works surface. 

Larry Bell is one of the most noteworthy representatives of abstract art in the postwar period. His career has spanned nearly six decades and has given him an audience in all the major art centers of the world. Bell’s medium, “light on surface,” has often utilized the technology of thin film deposition of vaporized metals and minerals on glass surfaces. His work has evolved in a number of directions, beginning with constructions, glass boxes and standing wall glass panel sculptures. Other bodies of work include Vapor Drawings, Mirage works (collages) on paper and canvas, Furniture de Lux, Sumer (a series of calligraphic bronze figures up to 30 feet in height), and Fractions, a series of 10,000 small 10 x 10-inch collage works on paper. Bell exhibits extensively in museums and galleries internationally and in the U.S. He was born in Chicago in 1939 and grew up in the San Fernando Valley of California. He briefly attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1973 and currently maintains studios in both Taos and Venice, California.