Image: Larry Bell, ‘VSE 3’, 1982, 12.5 × 8.5 in (31.8 × 21.6 cm). Courtesy Mark Moore Fine Art, Los Angeles
Mark Moore Fine Art is offering three works by Larry Bell from private collections on the secondary market, bringing together examples from the artist’s paper-based and canvas practices. The available works are ‘VSE 3’ (1982), ‘SMS 19 (Mirage Series)’ (1991) and ‘MP 253 (Mirage Series)’ (1991). Prices are available upon request, and all works remain subject to prior sale.
Bell emerged from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s and is associated with the Light & Space movement’s sustained investigation of light, reflection, transparency and perception. His work extends across painting, works on paper, glass sculpture and furniture design. The current offering includes a small work on paper alongside two later canvases, allowing prospective collectors to compare different materials and periods within his practice.
‘VSE 3’, made in 1982, measures 12.5 by 8.5 inches and is described as aluminum and silicon monoxide on Arches paper. The work belongs to Bell’s Vapor Drawings, a series that began in 1978 and used the same vacuum-coating technology developed for his glass surfaces. According to the material accompanying the offering, the process deposits thin films onto paper, whose more textured surface produces effects different from those achieved on glass, including varied color and surface qualities.
Bell’s studio has operated its own high-vacuum coating system since 1969. The technique, originally developed for aeronautics, enables thin metal films to be deposited onto glass and other surfaces. Bell has described glass as “a solid liquid” that simultaneously reflects, absorbs and transmits light. The Vapor Drawings gave him a faster and more improvisational way to work with the process than his labor-intensive glass sculptures and furniture, while also helping him develop an understanding of the technology that informed later work.
The two canvas works date from the Mirage Series, which the gallery describes as a departure from the minimal imagery for which Bell had been known until the mid-1980s. ‘SMS 19 (Mirage Series)’ measures 20 by 20 inches, while ‘MP 253 (Mirage Series)’ measures 30 by 30 inches; both are identified as mixed media on canvas. The series grew from Bell’s collage-based experimentation with materials and equipment in his studio. The accompanying account connects the shift in his work to his discovery, at age 46, of a profound congenital hearing deficiency and the altered experience that followed the use of hearing aids.
Bell’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Pasadena Art Museum in 1972, the Oakland Museum of Art in 1973, the Fort Worth Art Museum in 1975 and 1977, the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1982, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1986, the Denver Museum of Art in 1995 and the Albuquerque Museum in 1997. His work was also included in ‘The Responsive Eye’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965, ‘Primary Structures’ at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966, ‘Guggenheim International’ in 1967, ‘Documenta 4’ in 1968 and the Venice Biennale in 1976. Bell received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970 and lives and works in Taos, New Mexico, and Venice, California.
