Improvisational Maquette [Four Works]

A versatile collaboration of reflective forms, Larry Bell’s Improvisational Maquette sculptures (1987) mark a defining moment in the artist's career by introducing on an intimate scale the grand spatial ideas that characterize the artist’s holistic practice. Bell removes the interior scene from the picture plane to set it in physical space, relying all the while on his vacuum-coating technique to transform particles of free, available light into priceless glimpses of the sublime.
Initially seduced by the essential architecture of his LA studio, Bell fell captive to the sensuality of a corner – that democratic, all-inclusive right angle that snatches light, twists it around and propels it back into space. Having first rendered in two dimensions what only exists in three, Bell moved on from painting to his famed Cube series, turning to glass because of its accessibility and unique interactions with light. The coating process, self-taught from an esoteric manual and a few professional hints, evaporates chemicals in a vacuum chamber and subsequently reconstitutes them on the surface of the glass. The resulting gradient depends entirely on the chemical reacting to the loss of oxygen in the air, and the ever-curious Bell has expertly refined his understanding of these pseudo-sci-fi materials.
When the cubes became too restrictive, however, Bell went the only direction that made sense – outward. By opening up the cube into its constituent parts, Bell tested the boundaries not only of material but of the environment as a whole, making works as large as he could manage with his limited studio resources. Improv #1, debuted at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in 1983, marked a key turning point for the artist as his first work without a defined configuration. The present works, insofar as they may be arranged together at will or displayed separately, pay elegant, fractal homage to the artist’s spirit of spontaneity, without which Bell would have remained trapped inside his cube’s four walls forever.