In the film that accompanies Larry Bell’s new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Monaco, the 84-year-old artist is seen from behind, peering through a small aperture in the middle of an enormous, bank vault-style circular door. With his brimmed hat and braces, the artist could easily pass for Heisenberg or Oppenheimer observing some atomic experiment, and yet, given Bell’s highly scientific approach, the comparison goes beyond mere appearances.
The door belongs to Bell’s vacuum-coating machine (affectionately known to Bell as ‘The Tank’), a cylinder ten feet long and seven across, specially commissioned in 1969 to facilitate production of his early Standing Walls. These large-scale sheets of glass, seamlessly joined with silicone into corners, squares and zigzags, mark a departure from Bell’s comparably robust, metal-framed glass cubes produced in the 1960s, towards something purer, more ethereal and, in the artist’s words, more ‘improbable’.
