“Art is a teacher, it’s not an object,” Larry Bell is fond of saying. Since his swift and early rise to prominence in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, Bell – a central figure of the Light and Space movement – has been learning from the things he has made.

Bell’s earliest experiments with glass and mirrors emerged from abstract painting; the mirrored cubes that followed responded to developments in Minimalism. Unlike the hermetic boxes of Donald Judd or Tony Smith, for example, Bell’s reflective constructions were alive to the world around them, unpredictable in their perceptual effects and acutely sensitive to atmospheric and lighting conditions.

When, in 1968, Bell began coating glass panels himself in his own large vacuum chamber, he assumed full control of the mirroring process, even if he could never be in total control of its final results. Across the decades that followed, Bell explored a relatively narrow avenue of forms and materials, but opened it out into a vast terrain of subtly graduated effects