Larry Bell

Larry Bell (b. 1939) is a pioneering American artist whose work has reshaped how sculpture engages with light, space, and perception. Emerging from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, Bell built a practice grounded in experimentation with the behavior of light on reflective surfaces. His early abstract paintings soon gave way to his iconic cubes. These sculptures appear to dematerialize as they reflect, absorb, and transmit light. Using high-vacuum coating techniques adapted from aeronautics, Bell layers thin metal films onto glass to change the object with the viewer’s movement. His practice ranges from large-scale installations and site-specific works to works on paper such as the long-running Vapor Drawings. Across mediums, he challenges ideas of mass and volume, making solid materials appear weightless and fluid.

Bell lives and works in Venice, California and Taos, New Mexico. His work has been widely exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (1965, 1969, 1981), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1967–68, 1987–88), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1966–67, 1974), Tate, London (1970), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1959, 1967), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1976), the Walker Art Center (1968, 1971), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1983–84), among others.