Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

“Larry Bell: Time Machines” is the first comprehensive American museum survey of the artist’s work in nearly two decades. The exhibition features major bodies of Bell’s work, from the his early Cube series to his large-scale color-glass installations.

At ICA Miami, “Larry Bell: Time Machines” focuses attention on Bell’s innovative explorations of experiences generated by architectural space, as well as his little-known engagement with audiovisual media, including video and photography.

One of the most significant artists of his generation, Larry Bell (b. 1939, Chicago) is an important representative of a West Coast minimalism that married matter-of-fact materials and forms with intense sensorial experiences. Bell is most commonly known for his Minimalist sculptures—transparent cubes that thrive on the interplay of shape, light, and environment—that champion the ideas of the Light and Space Movement of the 1960s. Although he had early success with Abstract Expressionist painting, a side job at a frame shop led him to experiment with excess scraps of glass, thus beginning his fascination with the material’s interaction with light. Bell’s first series of cubes combined three-dimensional glass forms with transmitted light, creating illusions of perspective through angles, ellipses, and mirrors. His later purchase of industrial plating equipment allowed him to create sculptures with metallic-coated glass and, eventually, drawings on Mylar-coated paper.

This exhibition is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director, and Gean Moreno, Curator of Programs.