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 shared space on the second floor of 427 N Camden Drive. The exhibition focuses on two important works from the late 1960s—Placed Parallel, 1967 and Eliminating Strips, 1968—that exemplify Le Va’s radical rethinking of sculpture during a pivotal moment in the development of Postminimalism.
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 presents two installations that reflect Le Va’s sustained engagement with felt as both a sculptural material and a vehicle for exploring structure, entropy, and the physical consequences of simple actions.
Placed Parallel, 1967, incorporates aluminum bars and felt arranged along linear axes across the gallery floor. Rectangular strips and folded segments of dark felt are placed in relation to the rigid aluminum elements, establishing a measured yet open-ended spatial composition. The work suggests a system or procedure—parallel alignments, measured intervals—while simultaneously revealing the instability of those structures through the bending, curling, and displacement of the soft material. As in many of Le Va’s installations, the piece occupies the threshold between diagram and event: a structured arrangement that evokes both intentional placement and the potential for disruption.
In contrast, Eliminating Strips, 1968, foregrounds a more overtly process-oriented approach. Composed entirely of grey felt, the installation consists of sheets, fragments, and narrow strips scattered across the floor in dense accumulations. The material appears simultaneously folded, cut, and dispersed, creating a landscape of overlapping surfaces and granular debris. The work embodies Le Va’s longstanding interest in “elimination” and subtraction as generative procedures—removing, cutting, or fragmenting material in order to produce new spatial relationships. The resulting composition reads as the residue of a sequence of actions, inviting viewers to reconstruct and imagine the gestures that produced it.
Together, these installations illuminate Le Va’s pioneering contribution to the development of process-based sculpture. By privileging material behavior, physical action, and the viewer’s interpretive engagement, Le Va transformed sculpture into an open system rather than a fixed object. His installations resist closure, encouraging viewers to read the works as both formal compositions and traces of activity unfolding in time.
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. Most recently, the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein presented a retrospective for the artist which travelled to Fruitmarket, Edinburgh and Museum Kurhaus Kleve in 2025. 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.