Larry Bell

Larry Bell was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1939 and he lives and works between Los Angeles, CA and Taos, New Mexico. He attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1957 to 1959, and afterwards relocated to Venice, CA. While working in Los Angeles, he was represented at the Ferus Gallery alongside Ed Ruscha and Ed Moses. Bell explores the nature of light and space through his work in painting and sculpture. Throughout his career, he has experimented with ideas related to shape, light, and environment, and Bell is considered to have been at the forefront of the Light and Space Movement of the 1960s. Bell originally began his career in painting. His early works often included mirrored glass to explore the material’s relationship with light, as well as to create a disorienting connection between object and viewer. He then moved to sculpture. His first works were metallic-coated glass cubes transmitted with light, which created a disjointed effect and illusions of perspective. Bell continues to explore spatial ambiguities in his more recent ‘Light Knot’ sculptures, characterized by highly reflective polyester film sheets. These undulating sculptures are hung from the ceiling, swaying with any slight air movement, acting as mirrors that reflect the viewer and their surroundings in a fragmented mirage.