Before New York artist Barry Le Va, born 1941 in Long Beach, California, turned to art, he spent the early 1960s studying maths and architecture. In 1967, he finished an art degree at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and moved to New York in 1970, where he has lived ever since. Le Va is first and foremost a sculptor and draughtsman—for him the one is unthinkable without the other. His sculptures are always expansive, processual and transient. This locates his oeuvre at the edge of a contemporary definition of art, and the fact that this has been true of Barry Le Va throughout his entire career marks him out as one of the most significant contemporary American artists. He has long maintained that his ambition is to transcend the understanding of sculpture as consisting of enclosed and formed matter. His works are the result of a process of distributing, spilling, scattering, blowing, layering, dropping, throwing or crushing—using common materials like wooden slats, ball bearings, pieces of felt, aluminium bars, viscous oil, flour, powdered chalk, cast concrete and neoprene rubber. His works have been shown in many of the world’s foremost museums, and he was invited three times to the Documenta in Kassel. Most recently, the ICA in Philadelphia and the Museu Serralves in Porto honoured him with comprehensive retrospectives. Le Va’s works are represented in the collections of, amongst others, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, Yale University and the Graphische Sammlung in Munich.