Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of two major installations by Barry Le Va, marking the gallery’s inaugural presentation at its new space at 427 N Camden Drive in Beverly Hills. The exhibition brings together Eliminating Strips and Shattered On Center, On Edge, On Corners – Two Layers at a Time (Within the Series of Layered Pattern Acts), two works from 1968 which exemplify Le Va’s radical rethinking of sculpture during a pivotal moment in the development of Postminimalism. It follows Le Va’s recent Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein retrospective which travelled to Fruitmarket, Edinburgh and Museum Kurhaus Kleve in 2025.

Barry Le Va (1941–2021) was a central figure in the generation of artists who expanded sculpture beyond the discrete object, working alongside contemporaries such as Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, and Robert Smithson. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Le Va developed a body of work that rejected traditional sculptural permanence in favor of process, action, and spatial relationships. His installations frequently consist of dispersed materials—felt, powder, rubber, or metal—arranged through predetermined procedures or performative gestures. Rather than presenting sculpture as a fixed, resolved form, Le Va treated the gallery as a field of evidence in which viewers encounter the aftermath of actions, fragments, and spatial propositions. His works investigate the tension between order and disorder, control and contingency, and the ways in which physical matter can record time, movement, and events.

The exhibition centers on two works which demonstrate distinct yet related approaches to material transformation and spatial composition. In Eliminating Strips, 1968, grey felt is cut, folded, and dispersed across the floor in a dense accumulation of fragments, strips, and irregular forms. Broad sheets of material are interrupted by scattered debris, while narrow bands extend outward, suggesting both expansion and disintegration. The installation resists a singular point of view, unfolding as an immersive field that foregrounds process and invites viewers to reconstruct the gestures that produced it.

In Shattered On Center, On Edge, On Corners – Two Layers at a Time (Within the Series of Layered Pattern Acts), 1968, Le Va employs a more explicitly event-based procedure. Composed of twenty-seven sheets of glass in four varying sizes, the work is formed by stacking the sheets and shattering them at measured intervals. The resulting configuration retains the imprint of impact, with radiating fracture patterns registering the force of each action. The randomness of the cracks and shards contrasts with the geometric precision of the glass edges, while subtle variations in force and circumstance produce a uniquely contingent installation. As with many of Le Va’s works, the sculpture operates simultaneously as object and trace—an accumulation of evidence that suggests, but never fully reveals, the sequence of actions that generated it.

As Klaus Kertess has noted, “The violence of many of these works has been compared to the violence endemic to their time – from Vietnam to Watts to Kent State. However, Le Va’s scattering of matter was not politically motivated in the narrow sense. […] Le Va was testing (atomizing) the limits of sculpture and pushing the unclearly marked border between creation and destruction dangerously close to the latter.”

Together, these installations foreground Le Va’s pioneering use of process as a sculptural medium. Whether through cutting and dispersing felt or systematically shattering stacked glass, Le Va transforms material through direct physical intervention, allowing each work to exist as both structure and aftermath. His installations resist closure, instead proposing sculpture as contingent, temporal, and open-ended—an arena in which meaning emerges through the viewer’s encounter with material, space, and implied action.

Originally trained in architecture, Barry Le Va was born in Long Beach, California, and studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he received his BA and MFA in the mid-1960s. Soon after, his work was included in landmark exhibitions such as Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969 and Information at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. Over the following decades, Le Va participated in multiple editions of Documenta and the Whitney Biennial, and his work has been the subject of major exhibitions internationally, including a comprehensive retrospective at Dia: Beacon from 2019 to 2021. Other past retrospectives include Accumulated Vision, in 2005 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania and Barry Le Va 1966-88 in 1988, organized by the Carnegie-Mellon University Art Gallery, Pittsburg and travelled to the Newport Harbor Art Museum, CA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Neuberger Museum, State University of New York, Purchase, NY. His work is held in the permanent collections of leading institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Centre Pompidou.