Art + AuctionsYou Won’t Believe What Is Stealing the Spotlight at the Art Show of the SummerArtist Larry Bell’s bubblegum-hued installation featuring an assemblage of signature glass panes will turn heads  

By Sam Cochran

May 23, 2022

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Duo Nesting Boxes (2021), a diptych conceived for Dia Beacon.Photo: Thomas Barratt

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When a who’s who of the art world descended on Dia Beacon this past weekend for the foundation’s annual spring benefit, people were in for a shock—of pink, that is. A vibrant carpet in a custom bubblegum hue (Pantone color 243 to be exact), anchored an installation of new work by Larry Bell. Its threads gave bold dimension to Bell’s work, a site-specific assemblage of his signature glass panes, and new life to the space itself: a former printing facility that has been Dia’s upstate home since 2003. Attendees to the gala (made possible by Bottega Veneta) gleefully snapped the display for their feeds.

But social media buzz is besides the point. The introduction of a carpet so bright marks a radical departure for the artist, a pioneer of California’s Light and Space movement. Best known for his cube sculptures, Bell has, since the 1960s, explored glass as a tool for expressing light, color, and volume. At times he has vacuum-coated panels with metallic particles to catch the glow, or juxtaposed clear and gray sheets into zigzagging compositions that alter one’s experience of unfolding space. For his Dia commission, a diptych titled Duo Nesting Boxes, he combined green and blue layers to achieve a unique saturation of color. He made the decision to add the pink ground on a visit to Beacon, during which he and the curatorial team were discussing the possibility of a carpet base. (Past artworks had been presented on carpet bases as stabilizing devices, though always in a neutral tone.) That particular day, Dia director Jessica Morgan happened to be wearing a bright pink sweater. Its candy palette sparked joy—and inspiration. Bell pointed to Morgan and said that.

A portrait of artist Larry Bell at his studio.

Photo: Chris Grunder

“At Dia, you will see how this site-specific installation further explores Bell’s interests in color, hue, and shifting tones, which are drawn out and animated by the ambient natural light, creating further layers of density as you move around the work,” Alexis Lowry, a curator at Dia, notes.

“Bell’s approach to this installation recalls the care in which he developed the clear pedestals you see used in his early sculpture, which gives the impression they are floating in space. Here, the pink carpet grounds the piece in its own color experiment.”

To realize the bespoke floor covering, Bell enlisted Kvadrat, a Danish fabric company with a long history of artistic collaboration (including projects for Thomas Demand, Pipilotti Rist, and Olafur Eliasson). The brand crafted the carpet in record time, weaving fibers of pure New Zealand wool into a roughly 40-by-37-foot bound rectangle in less than two months. It’s a work of art unto itself. And Bell agrees: For the first time, he is considering the carpet as a visual component of the installation itself. On view through March 2024; dia.org

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