Larry Bell + Susanna Fritscher: as Light, as Air: Opening Saturday, July 25, 2026

'As Light, as Air' brings together two artists whose practices share a preoccupation with light, atmosphere, and the threshold between the material and the immaterial.

For more than six decades, Larry Bell, a leading member of California's Light and Space movement, has pursued an ongoing investigation into the physical and perceptual properties of light. His most recent works reflect his continued experimentation with surface, transparency, reflection, and color. Featuring recent glass sculptures, collage works from the 'Solar Studies' series, and exquisite watercolors, the exhibition reveals Bell’s enduring fascination with the ways light can be captured, refracted, and reimagined through material.

Bell's nesting cube glass sculpture 'Untitled (Red Poppy/Habenaro)' showcases his signature manipulation of light, reflection, and shadow using his proprietary vacuum coating techniques. His recent 'Triolith (Spa/Sunflower/Dusk)' features three interconnected, overlapping glass shapes or planes that bend and transmit light dynamically. In contrast, a selection of the 'Solar Studies' reveal a more intimate and spontaneous dimension of Bell’s practice, utilizing new processes and technologies to explore two-dimensional compositions of surface and light.

Together, these bodies of work demonstrate Bell’s ongoing pursuit of new ways to understand and experience light: not as a fixed subject, but as a dynamic force continually shaped by material, environment, and perception.

Paris-based artist Susanna Fritscher, presenting her first exhibition in the United States, creates immersive works that transform space into airy landscapes, where translucent materials interact with light, architecture, and the movement of air itself. Though her practice is often associated with immersive installations, the works presented in 'as Light, as Air' are compositions made from a fine textile weave unraveled to the limit of its hold and visibility. By "unweaving," the artist removes all constructive stability, exposing the object to a subtle volatility that seems to blend with the air.

The large 'Unthreaded (Détissé)' pieces are anchored between plexiglass, providing structure to the nearly undetectable threads, while the smaller 'Ghosts (Fantômes)' are free flowing fibers that gently undulate with the slightest movement of air, making the invisible perceptible. 

As Philippe-Alain Michaud, curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne -- Centre Pompidou, writes: “The optical systems imagined by Susanna Fritscher continue the transcendental current that runs through contemporary art practice, from Dan Graham to Bruce Nauman, Anthony McCall, Michael Asher and Ceal Floyer. This is the staging of a vision with no object, or of spatiality without depth; all the works portray the interaction of vision and light and the application of light in its element: investigating the scope of apparition (...)" 

Together Bell and Fritscher reveal light not as an external phenomenon, but as an active force—one that shapes our experience of space, material, and presence.