Larry Bell’s Luminous Geometry Heads to Madison Square Park

September 10, 2025Uncategorized

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1579348" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/IMG_03671.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A man, identified as artist Larry Bell, sits at a cluttered desk working on a silver Apple laptop in a studio filled with personal objects, art supplies and wall-mounted photographs.” width=”970″ height=”603″ data-caption=’Larry Bell in his studio. <span class=”media-credit”>Photo: Jordan Riefe for Observer</span>’>

A little bit of L.A. lands in the heart of Manhattan this fall as sculptor Larry Bell mounts his largest public art project to date in six locations across Madison Square Park. “Improvisations in the Park” includes the longtime Angeleno’s large-scale vibrantly colored glass cubes, Pacific Red II (at the 2017 Whitney Biennial), and Fourth of July in Venice Fog, as well as two new works, Cantaloupe but Honeydew and Red Eye II. Other works include Frankly Purple and Blues from Aspen.

“I used improvisation as needed,” Bell tells Observer about the show, which is on from September 30 through March 15. “Everything is based on right angles. And it is possible to combine different pieces of workable scale together and create new things from existing things. Each piece can be a thousand different pieces. Glass has the potential to absorb, transmit and reflect light. It’s the key to the whole thing.”

At 85 years old, Bell is the youngest member of the “Cool School” of the 1960s, a cadre of L.A.-based artists who exhibited at West Hollywood’s Ferus Gallery. Founded by artist Ed Kienholz and curator Walter Hopps (whose nickname for Bell was Ben Luxe, ‘son of light’), Ferus served as a platform for artists like Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses and John Altoon.

“I see him now and then when I go to L.A.,” Bell, who now lives in New Mexico, says of his old classmate, Ed Ruscha, one of the few other Cool Schoolers still alive. “The last time I saw him was at a memorial for (artist) Joe Goode (who passed away last March). We all went to Chouinard (Institute, now CalArts), together and stay in touch. There was a time when certain kinds of surveys were done that included our work in shows together, not so much in the last twenty years or so. But I have nothing but fond memories of all those people. In one way or another, they were all my teachers.”

Fresh out of Chouinard in 1959, Bell was making shaped paintings, sometimes featuring a 40-degree ellipse that mirrored the shape of the Andromeda galaxy, a form he believes has supernatural powers. But assessing his own work alongside that of classmates like Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, Bell decided painting might not be his thing and turned to sculpture.

Like his mentor, Robert Irwin, Bell is a member of the Light and Space Movement, focused on how the eye interacts with various conditions of light. Among its ranks are people like Mary Corse, Helen Pashgian, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell.

Early in his career, Bell worked at a Burbank framing store where he experimented with glass shards inside a wooden shadow box. His trademark vacuum deposition-treated glass cubes first began to appear around 1963. Acquired from Bronx Christmas ornament manufacturer Ben Koenig, the vacuum chamber layers glass with a film of aluminum, silicon monoxide or whatever it takes to stimulate the interplay between light and space. In 1965, Bell’s sold-out show at New York’s Pace Gallery put him on the art world’s radar at the age of 26. He spent about a year in the city, befriending people like Donald Judd (whose foundation is concurrently running Bell’s “Irresponsible Iridescence” exhibit), and Frank Stella. He even had tea with Marcel Duchamp.

“His wife served us in the parlor,” Bell says of the meeting. “On the walls were Max Ernst, Brancusi and an extraordinary number of artists who were legends. It was a very nice little visit. I remember asking him if he was doing any new work. And he said, ‘I’m working on a new show.’ And I said, ‘What is the show?’ And he said, ‘They’re earlier pieces.’ And I asked him how early, and he said, ‘Oh, when I was six or seven.”

A gallery space displays several large translucent glass cubes, one glowing pink, each occupying its own platform under a high wooden ceiling with exposed beams.

For the “Improvisations in the Park,” the laminated large-scale pieces do not use the vacuum chamber since the size of the glass makes it too cumbersome to handle. But in recent years, he’s used the chamber to treat pieces of mylar paper and laminate film that seem to bend light and color. Some hang from the ceiling in his studio in sculptured forms Bell calls “Light Curls.”

“It’s a lot cheaper than glass, and I could cut it easily to the size I wanted to work with,” he says of his non-cube renderings. “It started a whole new awareness of surface and light. And I became less involved with the kind of magic that happens with glass. There’s another kind of magic that I started to appreciate, and the coater was my introduction.”

As preparations are made for “Improvisations in the Park”, Bell busies himself with a new show, “Improvisations” at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Included is The Dilemma of Griffin’s Cat, a large-scale piece of four treated glass panels positioned like a booth, open at the corners, with exterior leaning glass panes propped against them. It dates to the 1980s and draws its title from the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man in which the hero, Griffin, conjures an invisibility potion. He first tries it on his landlady’s cat who seems to vanish entirely, but for its eyes.

“My six-year-old kid ran inside the standing sculpture when it was up in my studio,” Bell recalls, noting that today that kid is 50. “She had very dark eyes, and the light transmitting through the sculpture, all I could really see of her was her dark eyes. And it reminded me of the passage in the Wells story.”

Bell’s collection of Wells’ writing includes numerous first editions and several signed. As large as it is, the library is dwarfed by his collection of 400 guitars, mostly 12-string acoustic. Born partially deaf in one ear, he prefers the 12-string for its stronger vibrations. He plays well enough to clear a room, which is what he did when Lenny Bruce appeared at the Unicorn Club on Sunset Strip in 1963, the night he was arrested on obscenity charges. Bell was working the door when the crowd became unruly. The manager pulled Bruce off the stage and put Bell on with his 12-string. “After the first song, there was no one,” he recalls. “The place was empty.”

His other great achievement in the world of music includes being one of the last five living figures among the fifty-seven pictured on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, designed by British pop artist Peter Blake along with Jann Haworth. The likeness of Bell is a photo taken by actor Dennis Hopper in Ocean Park, in front of a shop called Mike the Tailor. “I didn’t know anything about the Beatles. That wasn’t the kind of music I liked,” says Bell. “I was into folk music and the blues and grungy stuff.”

Bell moved to Taos in the early 1970s, but kept his studio in the Venice section of L.A. up until a few years ago. “Nothing but fond memories. I do miss Venice. I miss being next to the ocean,” he says, looking back. “There’s a different kind of physical mechanism that, when you leave and come back, you can feel it. I’m quite sensitive to those things. A lot of decisions are made by feelings, and it gets at what I think art is all about. It’s all about feeling.”

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