In his multidisciplinary oeuvre, which in its beginnings is classified as process art or post-minimalism, Barry Le Va expanded the concept of sculpture by breaking open the closed nature of form and integrating the dimension of change and instability into his work. The exhibition provides an overview of his oeuvre from the 1960s to the most recent groups of works and follows a common thread: to examine the relationship between the installation and the graphic work.
Barry Le Va's installations are executed with care and according to a precise plan, but at the same time allow chance, chaos and order to become elements that determine the work. Throughout his life, the floor serves the artist as "ground" and a field for experimentation. As early as 1966, he created the first Distribution Pieces scattered on the floor, with which he suddenly became known to a wider public in November 1968 through a cover story in the magazine Artforum.
Exhibition view © Photo: Sandra Maier
Drawing is an essential part of Le Va's oeuvre. On the one hand, he sees them as part of his thought process; on the other, he understands them "as diagrams that function similarly to scores or compositions". In this sense, they often prepare the sculptural work, they can serve as plan-views, while at the same time allowing for interpretation and improvisation on site. Or they can stand completely on their own. The relationship between artwork and viewer has been of great relevance to Barry Le Va from the very beginning. Like crime scenes, his installations challenge the viewer to search for clues in order to reconstruct the sequence of actions that led to them or the underlying concept. This approach is based on Le Va's enthusiasm for the detective story genre: "I was fascinated by the idea of visual clues, by the way Sherlock Holmes managed to reconstruct a plot from obscure visual clues."
Together with the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and the Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein has early key works by Barry Le Va from the Rolf Ricke Collection, which first exhibited the artist in Europe in 1970. These works form a central starting point for the exhibition.
April 26 to September 29, 2024
