Larry Bell is an American sculptor who currently lives and works in Taos, New Mexico. He also maintains a secondary studio location in Venice, CA. Larry Bell was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1939. He attended Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles. Receiving acclaim at an early phase of his career, by 1961 Bell became known as one of the War Babies, a group of four Los Angeles artists that included, along with Bell, Ron Miyashiro, Ed Bereal, and Joe Goode. He had his first solo exhibition only three years out of art school; four decades later, his work continues to be included in innumerable exhibitions and is in private and public collections throughout the world. His reputation and standing in the history of American art is well established. Other works by Larry Bell can be seen at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Tate Gallery in London. Larry Bell’s first well-known works were glass boxes with etched and mirrored glass panes. These sophisticated works depended on the perception of the viewer and were concerned with the optical, veiling the technical processes which created them. New installations at Grounds For Sculpture by Larry Bell are Sumer Figure 14 and Sumer Figure 23. Both are part of his Sumer project, which is the complete opposite of his earlier glass boxes. The Sumer project is based entirely on physical human forms. The Sumer series was started in the 1990s when Bell used a computer sketch program to design human figure drawings. At the same time, Bell was working on a commission with architect Frank Gehry, who encouraged the artist to further develop his figure drawing concept. The concept for the project arose from an archeological dig in lower Mesopotamia where cuneiform tablets had been unearthed. These tablets told of the civilization of Sumer, buried more than 4,000 years ago. Leaving no physical depictions of themselves, the Sumerians have allowed Bell the liberty to create figures from his own vision: stick-like, calligraphic figures that represent a society inordinately important during its lifetime but now left only to an artist’s imagination. The outlines of these figures remind Bell of cuneiform letters developed in the pre-Babylonian civilization Sumer. Bell even invented a loose mythology surrounding his figures. The first set of these figures was commissioned to be cast in bronze, a fitting material considering that the Sumer civilization discovered and developed bronze. "Sumer is my most eccentric project. Eccentric because the sculptures do not relate to any of my previous work. The methodology that allows the use of a tool, a computer program, to create something improbable, is not eccentric. I use new methodology all the time. Everything about the Sumer project fell into place perfectly, in a most natural manner, from the computer generated figures to the completed sculptures." - Larry Bell | | 
Sumer Figure 14, 1998
cast bronze
204" x 105" x 72"
Loan courtesy of The Sculpture Foundation Sumer Figure 23, 1998
cast bronze
202" x 105" x 72"
Loan courtesy of The Sculpture Foundation |
