Barry Le Va (1941–2021) was an important figure in American art from the 1960s, part of a generation that included Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman and Robert Morris. Le Va was an innovator in the art of sculpture, with his Distribution or Scatter pieces of 1966 a breakthrough in terms of how art could be made and presented. The floor was his field of exploration and he used a wide range and variety of materials, setting a scene for the viewer to engage in: ‘the viewer always participates. They aren’t just an audience. They're a participating member, but not in the sense of performance’. His interest in transience, in sculpture as merely a short section of endlessly continuous time, has inspired generations of artists.
This exhibition is curated by Christiane Meyer Stoll of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein with the collaboration of David Nolan, who worked closely with Le Va and whose New York gallery looks after the artist’s Estate, and Rolf Ricke, the German gallerist who brought the work of Barry Le Va to Europe (along with the work of Bill Bollinger and Fred Sandback, two artists whose work we have been proud to include in our programme in exhibitions made similarly in collaboration with Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein). The exhibition includes important sculptures such as Corner–On Edge–On Center Shatter, 1968-71 (glass layered together then shattered); Cleaved Wall, 1969-70 (meat cleavers embedded in the gallery walls and floor); Right Angular Section (On a Diagonal), 1969 (chalk spread across a corner of the Gallery); and the rarely seen works such as A – (Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Felt, Steel, Bought, Cut, Folded, Placed, Rolled), 1966 and B – (Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Felt, Steel, Bought, Cut, Dropped, Arranged, Re-arranged), 1966. A key theme in the exhibition is the dialogue in Le Va’s work between sculpture and drawing, and beautiful drawings made both in preparation for sculptures and as stand-alone artworks; collages and wood block prints complete the presentation.
In partnership with Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and Kurhaus Kleve.
