Art Talk: The Art of Larry Bell
May 22, 2024 | 6 - 7:30pm
Presented in Whiteman Hall. Limited capacity.
TICKETS: Free for Members | $5 for the general public
Join us for an engaging dialogue celebrating the six-decade career of renowned experimental artist Larry Bell. This in-depth conversation with Rachel Zebro, associate curator for collections, will reveal Bell’s illuminating practice working with glass, sculptures, and mixed-media collages. Visitors will be able to witness the artist’s work on view in Larry Bell: Improvisations, the premiere day of the exhibition.
Larry Bell: Improvisations celebrates the artistic achievements of one of the most influential and renowned artists who emerged from the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s. An experimental artist from the start, Larry Bell (b. 1939, Chicago) has dedicated his career to exploring themes of light and surface by transforming industrial materials into physical realities. Emerging from the Light and Space movement alongside Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, and James Turrell, Bell's lifelong investigations into optical sensations have resulted in a large body of work that includes glass sculpture, drawings, collages, and furniture design. Each piece is skillfully executed with a machine-like precision that continues to captivate us with its illusory capabilities.
About the artist
Larry Bell is one of the most renowned and influential artists to emerge from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, alongside contemporaries Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin, and had garnered international repute by the age of 30. Known foremost for his refined surface treatment of glass and explorations of light, reflection and shadow through the material, Bell’s significant oeuvre extends from painting and works on paper to glass sculptures and furniture design. Bell’s understanding of the potential of glass and light allows him to expand visual and physical fields of perception, and his sculptures to surpass traditional bounds of the medium. He has said: ‘Although we tend to think of glass as a window, it is a solid liquid that has at once three distinctive qualities: it reflects light, it absorbs light, and it transmits light all at the same time.’
Bell’s use of commercial industrial processes in his studio, located in Venice, California since the 1960s, demonstrates his unparalleled skill and dedication in each step of his sculptures’ fabrication. Since 1969, his studio has managed its own high-vacuum coating system that allows him to deposit thin metal films onto his glass surfaces, harnessing a little known technique developed for aeronautics to create an unprecedented body of work.