Ex­hi­bi­ti­on | Bar­ry Le Va. In a sta­te of flux

Barry Le Va (1941–2021) is considered an innovator of sculpture in art after 1960. The Liechtenstein Art Museum is showing the first retrospective after the artist's death. "I guess at that time the body was a new territory, and it had to be investigated." —Barry Le Va In his multidisciplinary work, which was initially attributed to process art or post-minimalism, Barry Le Va expanded the concept of sculpture by breaking the closedness of the form and integrating the dimension of change and instability into his work. The exhibition provides an overview of his work from the 1960s to the last groups of works and follows a common thread: examining the relationship between the installation and the graphic work. Barry Le Va's installations are carried out carefully and according to a precise plan, but at the same time allow chance, chaos and order to become defining elements of the work. The artist uses the ground as a “ground” and a field for experimentation throughout his life. The first distribution pieces were created as early as 1966, 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. Drawing is an essential part of Le Vas's oeuvre. On the one hand he sees them as part of his thought process, on the other hand he sees 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 interpretation and improvisation on site. Or they can stand entirely on their own. The relationship between the work of art and the viewer has been of great relevance to Barry Le Va from the very beginning. Like crime scenes, his installations challenge viewers to look for clues in order to reconstruct the sequence of actions that led to them or the concept behind them. This approach underlies Le Va's enthusiasm for the crime fiction genre: "I was fascinated by the idea of visual evidence, by the way Sherlock Holmes managed to reconstruct a plot from obscure visual evidence." The Liechtenstein Art Museum, together with the St. Gallen Art Museum and the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, has key early 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. A production by the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, curated by Christiane Meyer-Stoll. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive publication in which the artist's voice is particularly heard through his "notes" (statements) and through the re-publication and first-time publication of interviews. The exhibition will subsequently be on display at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh (October 26, 2024 – February 2, 2025) and in the Kurhaus Kleve Museum (spring 2025).