In 1983, fellow Taos artist R.C. Gorman (1931-2005) commissioned Larry Bell to coat glass panels to be used as doors in Gorman’s new home. Bell stands in his front of a series of test work for that project, “Vapor Drawings,” a series of multicolored ellipses on reflective glass. The colors in these works come from the varied thicknesses of layers of thin films of metal and other elements which Bell has applied to the glass surface through a vacuum coating process. The films cause ordinary white light to refract and reflect the visible spectrum of its component colors.
The ellipse is one form with which Bell has experimented since the early 1960s. Bell discovered his work through his interest in the most common visual fixtures in his immediate environment. “We view most circular objects from an oblique angle of about forty degrees. The tires of our car, the dishes on our dinner table, are rarely viewed directly at ninety degrees.”
Image: Bell in Taos studio, photographer unknown, 1983.
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The cover of Artforum magazine, summer 1967, featured a Larry Bell untitled cube that was made in 1966 in his studio on East 9th Street in New York. The cover article was written by Fidel A. Danieli. Larry had three solo shows in 1967 that included his coated glass cubes: at Galeria Ileana Sonnabend in Paris; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and Pace Gallery in New York.
Larry Bell at work on L. Bell’s House Part II, 1962-63 (mirrored glass and wood, 25 inches square). This piece was made in Larry’s Westminster Street studio in Venice, CA prior to his discovery of the vacuum deposition process. He patiently scraped the mirroring off of commercial mirrors to construct the cube. This piece was last shown in Hauser and Wirth LA’s 2018 exhibition, "Larry Bell Complete Cubes.”
Larry Bell at Hauser and Wirth New York during his exhibition “Larry Bell Still Standing” in February 2020. The sculpture is from his 2019 Iceberg/Glacier series using laminated color glass. This one includes four colors in 16 panels. The piece was designed in the Taos studio and fabricated in Los Angeles. This is a still shot from a video walk-through produced by the gallery.
