LARRY BELL AND HIS TIME MACHINE
Larry Bell’s light Symphony.
That Larry Bell is brilliant is no revelation. Always in his significant hat, Bell can easily be mixed up with a poet from Renaissance, teleported into a new area of Modernism, which makes him an alien with unlimited superpowers, while playfully explores infinite possibilities of light, glass and materials. This fall, right before Miami Art week, Larry Bell’s spaceship landed in the spacious Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami featuring major bodies of artist’s work from his early Cube serious to his large-scale glass installations. Buckle up your seat belts and get ready for the newest “Lary Bell: Time Machines” adventure that just opened few days ago.
Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director, and Gean Moreno, Curator of Programs should be proud of their impeccable curation of the first comprehensive American museum survey of Bell’s work in more than two decades. What’s special about this exhibit is that the focus is on Bell’s innovative explorations and enormous experiences generated by architectural space, as well as his little-known engagement with audiovisual media, including video and photography.
We are absolutely mesmerized by this virtuoso’s transparent cubes combined with three-dimensional glass, where blacks, browns and gold smoke into the mix, transmitting and reflecting the light and making us unsure of what lies in the view. Bell’s, lit arena of minimalist yet decidedly compound, fascinating objects meticulously organized through the ICA museum space, retains interest in material giving the main role to the density of the light and its spectrum.
For his wonderfully original, patiently constructed standing and wall sculptures along with his famous vapor drawings, Bell usually exploits vacuum chamber, nickel chrome alloy, brass, to create an intensively subjective abstractions, often resting on basses made of a plexiglass.
And it’s more than just a reflection of a light, or manipulation of a glass without changing its surface. You can see, feel and observe the light trapped in these cubes and it might remind you of a small multidimensional colony that timelessly captures the dream.
