Larry Bell

The first major monograph ever published on the career of Larry Bell, iconic American artist and one of the stars to have emerged from the Light and Space movement in California in the 1960s.

Creatively presented in two distinct halves that reflect his dual interest in two- and three-dimensional forms - the first collecting his works on paper, printed on a heavily textured uncoated stock, and the second collecting his glass and metal sculptures, printed in a high-gloss finish - the book itself aims to reflect Bell's close attention to materials. In each medium, Bell's work reflects a lifelong enthusiasm for the physical properties of light and the materials it hits, and an equally tangible passion for playing with those properties with an almost childlike reverence and a spontaneity that belies or even defies his understanding of every process. From his earliest monochrome paintings in the 1950s to the glass cubes and standing glass-panel sculptures of the 1960s and 1970s, to his experimentation with vapor drawings in the 1980s and his most recent 'mirage works' and 'light knot' sculptures, Bell's career reads as one long and beautiful experiment in the properties of light on surface, and the relationship of surface to space.
With an essay by Robin Clark and an interview conducted by Cliff Lauson--and drawing on rarely published writings by the artist himself--this is the definitive survey of Larry Bell's career.

Larry Bell was born in 1939 and lives and works between Los Angeles, CA and Taos, NM. He has exhibited widely, olo exhibitions include the Pasadena Art Museum, California (1972); Fort Worth Art Museum, Dallas, Texas (1975 and 1977); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1986); Denver Art Museum, Colorado (1995) Carre d'Art Musee d'art Contemporain de Nimes, France (2011) and The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2014). He is represented by White Cube and Hauser & Worth galleries.
Robin Clark is a writer, curator, and art historian, and director of the Artist Initiative at SFMoMA. She is the author of Phenomenal, acknowledged as one of the most comprehensive surveys of the Light and Space movement, and lectured on Bell's work at the Chinati Foundation in 2014.
Cliff Lauson is Curator at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, in London. Since arriving in 2009 he has curated major exhibitions of work by Martin Creed, Ernesto Neto, Tracey Emin, and Ron Terada, and the critically-acclaimed group exhibitions Light Show and History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain. Cliff was previously Assistant Curator at Tate Modern.