Barry Le Va

Le Va's early floor sculptures from the late 1960's, such as Switch (1967/2016), include materials like aluminum, felt, glass and ball bearings dispersed across a designated space. Drawings from this period illustrate potential layouts that were to become essential to the artist's practice.

Off Center, Off Center (Variation 15) (1969 - Present) is a stack of multiple glass sheets, arranged in intersecting layers, which are then shattered at regular intervals with a sledgehammer. The clear glass is penetrated with sinuous cracks that begin at the centralized point of impact, and contrast directly with the straight edges of the glass sheets. Le Va first used glass in his installations in the 1960's. This evolved to presenting the material as an autonomous sculptural component in documenta 5 (1972). Despite the work's precise parameters, situational and environmental variables result in a unique and site-specific installation every time it is presented.

In the large horizontal, Area Switch: separated sections; sectioned into separates (1974), simple marks including points, halved squares, rectangles and circles are distributed irregularly across the sheet of paper.  Although Le Va's use of geometry recalls his training in architecture and mathematics, the universal vocabulary of shapes is abstracted and the viewer must study the individual components to discern a system.

The fluid application of ink in Le Va's drawing, Untitled, Feltrolls: cut (sheets, to strips, to particles) (1968-1993), emulates the spontaneity of his "scatter" installations. Circular forms are intermixed with opaque rectangles, intersecting lines and groups of dots. Le Va's return to the drawing in 1993 after a period of twenty-five years reflects the evolution of his practice. The pencil markings trace earlier forms and the composition is altered with the repeated addition of the numeral "2". Unlike his precise schematics drawn on graphing paper, the expressive nature of this composition relates to Le Va's capricious large-scale collages from the 1980's.

Le Va was born in 1941 in Long Beach, California. Since the late 1960s, his work has been included in several groundbreaking group exhibitions such as Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1969), Information at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970), documenta 5 (1972), 6 (1977), and 7 (1982) in Kassel, Germany; and the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual and Biennial exhibitions of 1971, 1977, and 1995. Le Va has had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and in Europe and has been the subject of major survey exhibitions, including at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1969); the New Museum, New York (1979); Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery, Pittsburgh (1988); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2005); and the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal (2006), among others. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; mumok, Vienna; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.  Le Va currently lives and works in New York City.