Larry Bell

Biography
Larry Bell (b. 1939) is a pioneer of the Light and Space movement. He uses a collage process and a proprietary evaporation tank to create a vapor casting. Since 1969, Larry Bell has used a high-vacuum coating system developed for aeronautics to deposit thin metal films onto glass and paper surfaces. He experiments with the properties of light on surfaces, developing a methodology based on spontaneity, intuition, and improvisation. To make his Vapor Drawings, Bell tapes paper to a steel sheet, which is then coated with Inconel, a nickel-chrome alloy, in a vacuum chamber. The process involves creating a vacuum, releasing pure oxygen, and passing an electric current to coat the paper with varying thicknesses of Inconel, depending on its curvature relative to the vapor source.

Larry Bell is one of the most renowned artists to emerge from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s. He has won prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Bell has exhibited widely, including at the San Antonio Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He has a long-term installation at Dia Beacon in Beacon, NY. Born in Chicago, Bell lives and works in Taos, NM.

Art is a teacher, it’s not an object. If you disavow being spontaneous and intuitive and improvisational, then you don’t trust yourself.– Larry Bell

Press Release
2025 Larry Bell and Wes Mills at Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, NM