The Dia Art Foundation presents a survey of early work by Barry Le Va at Dia:Beacon.

The exhibition features several of the artist’s most important floor-based, site-responsive installations from the 1960s, using felt, aluminum bars, and ball bearings, as well as early works using glass, meat cleavers, and powder. Though seemingly random in their presentation, these radical works are rigorously planned and arranged, and offer a counterpoint to the stark geometry of his peers’ Minimal sculptures. The yearlong exhibition opened in November.

Since the 1960s Le Va has been regarded as one of the leading practitioners of Postminimal and Process art. Alongside peers such as Robert Morris and Richard Serra, he renounced the contemporary mainstays of concrete form and geometry, embracing instead the concepts of dispersion, chance, and impermanence.

Originally educated as an architect, Le Va ultimately abandoned his training to focus on his artistic practice. However, the question of how space is organized and produced continued to inform his work, even as he turned his attention to the remnants of the sculptural process. Arranging non-precious materials such as felt and flour according to principles of order and disorder, Le Va’s scattered installations compel the viewer to consider this evidence of prior activity as they move through the gallery.

“From the very beginning of hiAfter his first solo exhibition in 1969 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, his work was included in other landmark presentations including Anti-Illusion:

Procedures/Materials in 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Information in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City. Le Va has also participated in Documenta (1972, 1977, and 1982) and the Whitney Annual and Biennial exhibitions (1971, 1977, and 1995). Major surveys of his work have taken place at, among others, the New Museum, New York (1979); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2005); and the Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2006). In recent years Le Va’s work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York (2015–16); Yale University School of Art (2015); Dallas Museum of Art (2015); and David Nolan Gallery, New York (2018). He lives and works in New York.

Dia:Beacon is located at 3 Beekman Street, adjacent to the Beacon Train Station.