Opening 20 February 2020, Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition ‘Larry Bell. Still Standing,’ presents a range of the artist’s sculptural works from the 1970s to the present day. A pioneer in his approach to the surface treatment of glass, and a master of unprecedented explorations of light, reflection, and shadow, Bell has documented perceptual phenomena through a tirelessly inventive sculptural practice. This exhibition charts a less explored, but seminal moment in Bell’s practice when he began to radically deconstruct his signature glass cubes into the more architecturally-scaled, fragmented, crystalline forms or what he referred to as ‘standing walls.’ ‘Still Standing’ also presents a number of the artist’s small-scale studies, illuminating Bell’s process as he meditated on scale and translated his ideas into larger sculptural works.

Rather than being contained, Bell’s standing walls were site-specific to every space in which they were presented, wholly permeable to their setting. The immersive environments created by his standing walls were capable of challenging perception in new ways, their expansiveness opening viewers up to other ways of seeing. In examining this body of work, the exhibition highlights the artist’s critical contribution to the history of Minimalism and installation art. The exhibition traces Bell’s evolution after a move to Taos, New Mexico in 1973. Finding conventional gallery spaces of the time could not physically accommodate what he aspired to produce, Bell set out to make work on his own terms.

Bell’s installations quickly rose to acclaim as they attracted institutional exhibitions in the 1970s. Among the most widely known of the standing walls is ‘The Iceberg and Its Shadow’ (1974). This sweeping work, which consisted of fifty-six large-scale, freestanding glass panels, was first shown at the Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas, and later became part of the collection at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.