“You need light to see, you need space to work,” Larry Bell has wryly stated on more than one occasion when asked for his thoughts on the Light and Space movement with which the celebrated artist has been associated since its inception in the mid-1960s.
“The legacy of Bell, however, is not only material but also conceptual. For the pursuit of industrial materials represented a rejection of art as an object, a dominant theoretical underpinning of Minimalism, in pursuit of art as experience. The use of glass, mirror, metallic films, paper and leftover scraps of Mylar were, for the artist, a means to an end, not the end itself. There were materials through which Bell interacted with his primary medium, light, and was able to transmit that experience to the viewer.”
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/bell-larry/
Bell is often associated with Light and Space, a group of mostly West Coast artists whose work is primarily concerned with perceptual experience stemming from the viewer’s interaction with their work. This group also includes, among others, artists James Turrell, John McCracken, Peter Alexander, Robert Irwin and Craig Kauffman.
(Wikipedia)
“At various times and particularly in the 1960s some artists have worked near what could be called the upper limits of perceptions, that is, where the eye is on the point of being overwhelmed by a superabundance of stimulation and is in danger of losing its power to control it… These artists sometimes produce the effect that the threat to our power to resolve what is seen heightens our awareness of the process of seeing…”
– Michael Compton essay from Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler exhibition at Tate Gallery, London, 1970
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