Larry Bell explores the ethereal nature of glass in Monaco

In the film that accompanies Larry Bell’s new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Monaco, the 84-year-old artist is seen from behind, peering through a small aperture in the middle of an enormous, bank vault-style circular door. With his brimmed hat and braces, the artist could easily pass for Heisenberg or Oppenheimer observing some atomic experiment, and yet, given Bell’s highly scientific approach, the comparison goes beyond mere appearances.

The door belongs to Bell’s vacuum-coating machine (affectionately known to Bell as ‘The Tank’), a cylinder ten feet long and seven across, specially commissioned in 1969 to facilitate production of his early Standing Walls. These large-scale sheets of glass, seamlessly joined with silicone into corners, squares and zigzags, mark a departure from Bell’s comparably robust, metal-framed glass cubes produced in the 1960s, towards something purer, more ethereal and, in the artist’s words, more ‘improbable’.

‘Larry Bell: Works from the 1970s’ at Hauser & Wirth, Monaco

Within the tank’s airless seal, Bell plays with the molecular structure of his sculpture's surfaces, evaporating metals at high temperatures to maintain their crystalline structure and coat the glass in gossamer films of aluminium or silicon oxide. As Bell simply puts it: ‘There are things that can be done with metals and surfaces inside an environment that contains no air that cannot be done in the presence of air.’ By layering these films and altering the opacity or reflectivity of the glass, Bell’s Standing Walls become places of performance and optical distortion, activated only by the presence of a viewer.

Four of Bell’s largest and most ambitious Standing Walls from the early 1970s are shown in Hauser & Wirth’s cavernous subterranean gallery. Lit by an oculus that floods the space with Riviera sunshine, each sculpture feels charged to its maximum illusory potential, fluidly disappearing and rematerialising, simultaneously an object and its surrounding environment. For all their technical precision, there is no shortage of subtlety or sensuousness. In a city where glass abounds in the austere forms of high-rise hotels and apartment blocks, these works remind us of the material’s ability to alter our sense of space and of ourselves.

Adding to the room’s optical acrobatics is a large wall piece, Moving Ways (1978), one of Bell’s vapour works made using a modified version of the vacuum coating process to apply aluminium to black paper. Seen through, or reflected by, his sculptures, the works envelop one another, pooling their powers of illusion to create fleeting moments of perfect harmony.

Outside, in the Jardins des Boulingrins that lie adjacent to the gallery, a more recent and highly coloured glass work, The Blue Gate (2021), offers a more complex structural counterpoint to the Standing Walls. Installed on a lawn that forbids viewers to walk on it and approach the sculpture, its surfaces are robbed of their full visual potency and it feels oddly dormant. This work, together with the exhibition as a whole, reminds us that while these sculptures may have been created in a vacuum, they are only truly alive in close proximity to people.

‘Larry Bell: Works from the 1970s’ is at Hauser & Wirth, Monaco, until 31 August 2024

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