Background
Barry Le Va was born on December 28, 1941, in Long Beach, California, United States.
1250 Bellflower Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90840, United States
During the period from 1960 till 1963, Barry studied at California State University, Long Beach.
9045 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90045, United States
In 1963, Le Va enrolled at Otis College of Art and Design, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1964. Later, in 1967, Le Va attained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the same educational establishment.
1250 Bellflower Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90840, United States
During the period from 1960 till 1963, Barry studied at California State University, Long Beach.
9045 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90045, United States
In 1963, Le Va enrolled at Otis College of Art and Design, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1964. Later, in 1967, Le Va attained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the same educational establishment.
Barry Le Va was born on December 28, 1941, in Long Beach, California, United States.
During the period from 1960 till 1963, Barry studied at California State University, Long Beach. In 1963, he briefly studied at Los Angeles College of Art & Design. The same year, in 1963, the artist enrolled at Otis College of Art and Design, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1964. Later, in 1967, Le Va attained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the same educational establishment.
In 1968, Barry was appointed an instructor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, a post he held till 1970. Between 1973 and 1974, he taught Advanced Sculpture at Princeton University. In 1976, Le Va began teaching graduate-level classes in Sculpture at Yale University.
As for Barry's career as an artist, it was in 1966, that he started to create his pioneering scatter pieces on the floor. His early floor sculptures and installations 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 of his career illustrate potential layouts, that were to become essential to the artist's practice.
Some time later, Le Va began to produce works with cleavers, embedded in walls or floors. He first considered the sculptural potential of cleavers in 1969, while visiting a butcher supply store in Minneapolis. The artist's initial experiments involved the floor or the lower end of a wall, while later installations progressed vertically.
In the 1980's, Le Va created a series of large-scale collages, characterized by drastically shifting perspectives. For the last time, the artist has been creating monumental abstract works and site-specific installations.
Speaking about La Va's exhibitions, his first solo shows were held in 1969 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Since that time, Barry has been presenting his work across the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel. Beginning in the late 1960's, his work has been included in landmark exhibitions, such as "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (1969) and others. Le Va participated in 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.
In addition, Le Va has been the subject of major survey exhibitions at the New Museum, New York City (1979), the Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery, Pittsburgh (1988), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2005) and the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal (2006). In 2009, the artist exhibited at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York City.
More recently, Le Va's works were included in "Greater New York" at MoMA PS1, New York City (2015-2016); "Piece Work", organized by Robert Storr, at Yale University School of Art, New Haven (2015) and "Bold Abstractions: Selections from the DMA Collection 1966-1976", curated by Gavin Delahunty, at the Dallas Museum of Art (2015).
Currently, the artist lives and works in New York City.
Barry Le Va is among the leading figures of post-studio and process art of the late 1960's. With unconventional materials and reductive forms, Barry redefined sculpture by introducing new subjects, formats and modes of production in the 1960's in tandem with Richard Serra and Eva Hesse, among others. He gained prominence for his works, called "distributions".
Barry received several awards, including the Young Talent Grant in 1968, Guggenheim Fellowship (for Sculpture) in 1974 and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976. In 2000, he was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize.
The artist's abstract sculptures, installations, drawings and editioned works are featured in major art collections around the world, including those of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, among others.
Taking inspiration from popular crime novels, as well as contemporary art theory, Le Va charges his viewers to attempt, like detectives at a crime scene, to decipher an order, underlying the apparent chaos.
Quotes from others about the person
"Like his art, he's not such an easy guy to be around, by turns challenging, gracious, explanatory and gnomic."
