Larry Bell: The Sixties

Larry Bell will be the subject of an exhibition at PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, New York from September 30 through October 22, 2005. The artist will be present at a public opening on Thursday, September 29 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Larry Bell: The Sixties includes his signature glass boxes, wall shelves and large standing Icebergs. The boxes specifically signaled his shift to three-dimensional objects, which allowed him to investigate the nature of visual space that captured light and contained it, unlike his colleagues of the time Robert Irwin and James Turrell, whose work enveloped it into the space.

In the early 1960s Bell made monochrome paintings on shaped canvases. Shortly thereafter, he incorporated glass panels into his paintings and by 1962 the artist made his first cubes with wood, glass and chrome. By the middle of the decade, Bell’s process evolved to incorporate a vacuum coating onto the transparent surfaces of glass cubes, resulting in a manipulation of subtle color in the light spectrum. A leading figure of the California school of Light artists this is the first exhibition of the influential work in many years.

Larry Bell: The Sixties is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery in thirty-two years. Bell previously exhibited at the Pace Gallery in 1965, 1967, 1970-71, and 1973. Following the opening of this exhibition Bell will return to New Mexico to continue on a new series of cubes, which the gallery will exhibit in the future.

The artist (b. Chicago 1939) lives and works in Taos, New Mexico. From 1945-1973 his primary residence was in Los Angeles. Bell was a student of Robert Irwin’s at the Chouinard Art School in California from 1957-1959, and in the 1960s, as a young artist, he participated in several important museum group shows including The Museum of Modern Art’s The Responsive Eye (1965); Primary Structures (1966) at the Jewish Museum in New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual Exhibition (1967); and 14 Sculptors: The Industrial Edge (1969) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis among others.

Over the years Bell’s performances, paintings, objects, environmental spaces, photographs, drawings, works on fabric, and furniture have been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide.

His work is in many public collections including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; Art Institute of Chicago; Denver Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum; MIT, Cambridge; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Museum of New Mexico; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Pressetext

Larry Bell: The Sixties
Ort: 32 East 57th Street, New York