Larry Bell
Golden
Golden
$425,000
Golden
1969/2022
Coated glass with chrome edging
31 x 31 x 31 cm / 12 ¼ x 12 ¼ x 12 ¼ in
Internationally renowned for his skilful manipulation of glass, Larry Bell is one of the most influential artists to emerge from the 1960s ‘Light and Space’ movement in California. Through his deft handling of glass, light, and shadow, Bell has transgressed the conventional boundaries of contemporary sculpture by studying the elusive nature of translucent objects in space. In seeking to make the material and immaterial converge, Bell’s pioneering approach to his artwork allows his inherently physical medium to become a weightless, optical composition of perceptual phenomena.
‘Golden’ (1969/2022) is a freestanding cube sculpture that plays with the relationships between matter, perception, and form. The artwork sits atop a translucent glass plinth, as if it were floating in space. The surface treatment of the sculpture is achieved through thermal evaporation technology developed for cutting-edge aeronautics and optics – a process the artist began using in the ‘60s and is still refining in his work today. This technology deposits films of vaporized metallic and non-metallic substances onto glass panes without altering the fundamental nature of the glass itself, rendering a chimerical visual effect of space and form. The subtle tonal variations between each color cause the glass to appear quasi-immaterial when the light hits the cube—as though Bell has captured the sculpture’s physical volume in the process of dissolving.
‘I’ve always been interested in the surfaces of glass, and they are quite varied—even though we tend to think of glass as a window, it’s a solid liquid that has at once three distinctive properties: it reflects light, it transmits light, and it absorbs light all at the same time. I like to play around with those things, alter them slightly ... and it changes the rest of them.’—Larry Bell [1]
‘Golden’ is the historic culmination of the work Bell began in the late ‘60s using original materials and plans from the era and is a testament to his tirelessly inventive sculptural practice
Bell’s clever manipulation of his materials transforms glass from a tangible and fixed matter into a seemingly ethereal and massless substance, allowing a dazzling play of light and reflections to bloom across the glass panels. Through his dexterous application of surface coating, Bell is able to generate spatial ambiguities based on the varying ratios of light reflected and transmitted by the surfaces, creating fleeting sensory experiences of changing color and light that give form and physicality to the otherwise intangible. Here, the ethereal beauty of Bell’s nuanced vision transpires from an aesthetic language giving way to the spontaneous play of light and its infinite perceptual possibilities.
Larry Bell with 'Homage to Griffin,' 1980 © Larry Bell. Photo: Tony Vinella
Larry Bell with 'Homage to Griffin,' 1980 © Larry Bell. Photo: Tony Vinella
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.