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Toomey Tourell Fine Art is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition with the artists Larry Bell and Greg Edwards, entitled Larry Bell and Greg Edwards in San Francisco.

Dates of Exhibition: December 20th, 2011 – January 31st, 2012.

Larry Bell, born in Chicago, currently lives and works in Taos, New Mexico and Venice, California. Bell is one of the most noteworthy representatives of abstract art in the postwar period, whose career had given him an audience in all the major art institutions of the world, exploring a multitude of mediums and materials. Bell’s career has evolved in a number of directions, including canvas, constructions, glass boxes, monumental bronze sculptures, and here, the medium of paper. The body of work in this exhibit- “small figure collages”, are comprised of laminated plastics, Mylar and paper. Sheets of these materials have been coated with vaporized metals and quartz in a thermal vacuum chamber. Heat is then applied to the metals in this vacuum environment, melting the metals which then gas or vaporize. As this is taking place within a vacuum, there is no resistance to the vaporized metals spreading on to, and coating, the other materials contained in the chamber. When the metals gas and coat the surface of these materials, they form and retain a crystalline structure. These crystals and light create rainbows, or light interference colors. These crystals break up the light spectrum, giving the colors a tight, elongated wave. The thicknesses of the coating determine the resultant colors- metal creating shine while quartz creates color. There is no pigment applied other than the original color of the papers. These materials are then cut up to form the compositions, and finally, adhered to a substrate in a hot vacuum, or press.

Larry Bell exhibits extensively in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, and has been awarded numerous public art commissions. In collaboration with the current “Pacific Standard Time” exhibits in the Los Angeles area, Bell’s work has been included recently in the Getty, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, to name a few. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Tate Gallery in London, and the Getty, in addition to many other museums and institutions.

Gregory Edwards, a Bay Area based artist, began his career as a photographer. In the Sixties, this “new media” provided him with the impetus to begin his current practice involving drawings, monotypes, lithographs and digital technology. Though more widely known for his larger, gestural abstract paintings, it was drawing that played the seminal role in his ongoing artistic exploration. In this body of work, which Edward’s calls “American Hierographyx”,  he synthesizes a variety of techniques which encompass drawing, Afro-centric magical pattern and narrative tradition with technologically advanced digital printers. This work is an extension of the historical use of industrial artifacts in art and techniques such as collage, though in some cases that connection may only be implied. In the abstract expressionist paintings that Edwards is well known for, the markings might be only partially visible, and layered in the expanded tonal space of the canvas. In these more graphic renderings, the marks are much more direct, and refer to the outlines of objects that are more concrete and symbolic. This series deploys radical, positive and relevant compositions ripe with meaning and purpose from the African visual tradition. These works are based on “forty years of both solitary and collaborative efforts at dialogue with pen, brush, ink, jazz musicians, poets, and of course, painters and sculptors.” Edwards seek to evoke an intuitive mechanism- a kind of sketchbook of creative dreaming- which is then scanned and printed onto canvas.

Gregory Edwards has exhibited widely here and abroad, including the de Saisset Museum, The Municipal Art Gallery of Los Angeles, and the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts. His work is in numerous important private and public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. 

This is Greg Edward’s second show with Toomey Tourell, and Larry Bell and Greg Edward’s first exhibit together in San Francisco.

Larry Bell and Greg Edwards

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