Larry Bell came to prominence in the early 1960s with his parallelogram-shaped acrylic paintings and began experimenting with mirrored and transparent glass during the same period. Soon Bell came to the realization that his paintings were in fact “illustrations of volumes” and “decided to stop painting illustrations of volumes and make the volumes themselves.” Combined with the artist’s preoccupation with light-surface interactions, this drive resulted in vacuum-coated glass cubes with simultaneously reflective, refractive, and light-absorbent sides—Bell’s best-known body of work. Vacuum coating involves the application of an extremely thin layer of metal onto surfaces in a vacuum chamber; the specific metal used and the particularities of application (amount, regularity, etc.) determine the color of the cubes, in addition to defining their visual properties of transparency and iridescence.

Church Study 4/4/16 builds on the same process of vacuum-coating, but here paper replaces glass as the material support—a process Bell has been experimenting with since his earliest Vapor Drawings in 1978. The pulp and weave of the paper become additional factors influencing its interaction with the applied coating. In Bell’s words, “[i]f you look at [the paper] under glass, you see that the paper is like a lawn; it’s got little hairs.” Although the point of departure for Church Study 4/4/16 is the architecture of Bell’s Los Angeles studio, a former Christian Science church, the work proposes a world of its own and invites the viewer to investigate the reciprocal relationship between light and materiality.