At 85, Larry Bell—one of the original figureheads of Southern California’s Light and Space movement—hardly projects the aura of a sage-like guru. At the preview for his new exhibition in Madison Square Park yesterday morning, he wore a tactical vest over a checked shirt, dark trousers, and his signature fedora. He looked more like a field operative than a mystic of light. It was a beautiful fall day, clear and bright.
“I hope you enjoy the work,” he told the assembled crowd, “and I recommend finding an interesting place that’s comfortable to sit in the presence of any of the works here because they’ll constantly be changing as the clouds and the sun move. The animation that is within the pieces tells a different story by the minute. The pieces have changed since I started talking. The changes are subtle, but they’re profound.”
Larry Bell with his work. © Larry Bell. Photo: Chris Grunder. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley.
That sense of continual transformation anchors “Improvisations in the Park,” Bell’s first outdoor public installation in New York and the largest public project of his seven-decade career. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, the exhibition features six monumental glass works—including two made specifically for the occasion—that refract, absorb, and transmit light in endlessly shifting patterns. Installed across the park’s lawns, they converse with the turning trees, the passing shadows, and the skyscrapers looming just beyond the branches.
“They’re active pieces,” said Denise Markonish, the Conservancy’s chief curator. “They feel like they’re alive as sculptures because they’re constantly shifting and changing across the day.”
Installation view of Larry Bell’s Frankly Purple, 2022, in Improvisations in the Park. Photo: Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley.
The result is both jarring and restorative: crystalline minimalism at odds with the messy seasonal churn of the park, yet somehow in harmony with it—offering order, revelation, and reflection. It is a welcome respite from the damning daily news cycle. This park was always a tonic; now, Bell’s works offer something closer to an escape from the mortal coil. There are passages of violet and crimson, sheets of semitransparent glass that lock into one another with a rare sense of perfection and order.
Installation view of Larry Bell’s Fourth of July in Venice Fog, 2018 (left), and Cantaloupe but Honeydew, 2025 (right), in Improvisations in the Park. Photo: Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Bell has long insisted that spontaneity and intuition are his true studio tools, as much as glass and vacuum coating. He first tested those instincts in New York in the mid-1960s, during his brief tenure in the city, where he met Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and even Marcel Duchamp. Judd would become both a friend and early collector of Bell’s work. One of Bell’s early cubes remains installed on the fourth floor of the Judd Foundation in SoHo, which was once the artist’s residence.
“I’ve known Larry all my life,” said Flavin Judd, Donald’s son, who serves as artistic director of the Judd Foundation, which is presenting the show. “I let Larry do whatever he wants.”
That bond resurfaces now in Bell’s other New York exhibition, “Irresponsible Iridescence” at Judd Foundation’s 101 Spring Street, which opened the same day and runs through January 31, 2026. If the park show presents monumental glass improvisations in dialogue with nature and skyline, the Judd exhibition pares things down to a more intimate scale—narrative “Solar Study” works created with new processes, alive with iridescent surfaces that carry the same spirit of chance and trust. Some look like lovely oil splotches languidly floating atop water, others like shattered futuristic visions.
Installation view of “Irresponsible Iridescence,” September 29, 2025–January 31, 2026, 101 Spring Street, Judd Foundation, New York. Photo: Timothy Doyon © Judd Foundation. Art © Larry Bell.
Bell is so indelibly associated with his cubes and glass sculptures that it can be easy to forget how strong he is in two dimensions. These new works, shimmering with layered surfaces, remind us of that—they recast his rhythmic sensibility in a flat format without losing any of the perceptual richness. I think in these one finds a different kind of zen and letting go, both for the viewer and the maker.
“Sometimes when I’m lucky the work creates itself,” Bell has said. “I am only responsible for turning on the equipment and turning it off. The results of the use of the equipment become autonomic. In other words, I can find a narrative interpretation in the order of arrangement of the surfaces created.”
Together, “Improvisations in the Park” and “Irresponsible Iridescence” reveal Bell working on twin registers: vast public sculptures that shift and mirror the seasons, and intimate studies of dynamism harnessed in shimmering whirls.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
