Larry Bell: Bay Area Blues

PRESS RELEASE

Larry Bell: Bay Area Blues

18 September – 19 October 2019

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to announce Larry Bell: Bay Area Blues, the gallery's first solo exhibition with the acclaimed West Coast Light and Space artist. An experiment in color, the works showcase the complementary effects of light, reflection and saturation. 

Bay Area Blues will comprise four new glass cubes, featuring the eponymous sculpture Bay Area Blues, a large-scale work whose formal explorations revisit Bell’s 1992 sculpture Made For Arolson. Bell newly debuted the large-scale cube-within-a-cube format with his 2017 Whitney Biennial installation Pacific Red II. Fabricated with laminated glass, these monumental works continue Larry’s quest: to consider reflected light through paired colors.

For Bay Area Blues, the form within consists of two colors – one blue and one foggy white – which are both repeated in opposing layout in the outer form. The effect: an infinite number of illuminated blue hues, interacting as the viewer moves throughout the gallery. Three maquettes accompany the large sculpture, offering a birds-eye view and study of light and hue.

Larry Bell lives and works in Taos, NM and Venice, CA. Bell attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA, from 1957 to 1959. Bell is a recipient of multiple recognitions, among them the Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts, Santa Fe, NM (1990); the Guggenheim Fellowship (1970); and grants from the Copley Foundation (1962) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1975).

Bell has had solo exhibitions at such institutions as the Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, NM; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; Carré d’Art Musée d’art Contemporain de Nimes, France; The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Fort Worth Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, CA; and The Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM.

Group exhibitions include Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, Tate Britain, London, 1970; 11 Los Angeles Artists, Hayward Gallery, London, 1971; Geometric Abstraction and Minimalism in America, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1989; Phenomenal, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, 2011; Continuum: Light, Space & Time, The Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM, 2016; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2017; and Seeking Stillness, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2017.

Selected public collections include Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.