Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight. The blocks resemble a stone carving, or slabs of wood shaped into a simple organic composition whose overall sheen is varied through a thin layer of aluminum vapor. Yet, the real material of Bell’s piece is actually light, formed within the viewer’s eye into masses as present as stone.
Often associated with the Light and Space movement—which as also includes James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and John McCracken—Larry Bell has been an important figure and influence in the West Coast contemporary art scene since the early 1960s. Less interested in the material, concrete qualities of the object than in heightening awareness of the environment in which it is situated, his abstract geometric sculptural works possess a certain mystical aspect and engage the viewer in a myriad of perceptual experiences.
Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot...
This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...
In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Kadar Brock creates dynamic abstract paintings that are born from a process of painting, scraping, priming, sanding, and painting again...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...