Larry Bell

American, 1939

Larry Bell is an American artist best known for his Vapor Drawings. These works, like his sculptures, employ a vacuum chamber, nickel chrome alloy, rag paper, and mylar strips, to create improvised abstractions. Using electric currents and pure oxygen, he vaporizes the alloy which settles as a fine coating on the paper. “Masking the paper with thin PET film strips to expose areas related to the shape of the page plane enabled me to generate images spontaneously,” he said of his process. “This work gave me a conscious glimpse of the inherent power of spontaneity and improvisation. The work happened intuitively—in a short amount of time I created a number of interesting pieces.” Born on December 6, 1939 in Chicago, IL, Bell attended the Chouinard Institute in Los Angeles, originally intending on becoming an animator for Disney, instead he transferred into fine art, studying under Robert Irwin alongside fellow students Billy Al Bengston and Ken Price. Throughout the following decades, the artist exhibited his work in a variety of venues including the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and the Tate Gallery in London. Bell currently lives and works in Taos, NM. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among others.

Courtesy Artnet