1928 - 2023
Spanning a period of more than six decades, Robert Irwin's site-responsive works aimed to refocus the habituated eye, posing questions rather than providing answers and encouraging the viewer to be made aware and afresh of the visual field around them. Irwin said about his art that he tried to ‘open up things’ and ‘just allow them to happen’, but also that ‘the pure subject of art is human perception’: a conditional activity determined by context.
Residing on the West Coast, Irwin began his career in the late 1950s making Abstract Expressionist paintings which were at first gestural and intense and then developed into minimal studies in form and color, sometimes on shaped canvases. His interest in perceptual phenomena soon took him beyond notions of object making and the studio, and he began to make art in response to a particular site, or to a set of conditions, switching his focus to energy and process rather than material and object.
A leading exponent of the ‘Light and Space’ movement, Irwin’s installations employed light, string, and scrim to create subtle alterations in physical space. Architectural in scale, his works emphasized and exposed particular spatial and perceptual experiences, for example by painting walls a particular color; suspending panels to create a focused space beneath; or using taut panels of material scrim to change and intervene in specific architectural details. Panels of scrim stretched on wooden frames were also used to create sequential walls or chambers, whose color was manipulated and harnessed to potent effect, using colored gels over fluorescent lights. In this way, a physically perceptual passage for the viewer was created through works that, instead of emphasizing their presence, receded through their light translucency and acted like brackets for our phenomenological experience.
From the early 1980s, Irwin became well known for his public works which reacted to the specific conditions of a particular site, often making use of features such as the surrounding architecture, topography or indigenous flora.
Robert Irwin was born in 1928 in Long Beach, California, and lived and worked in La Jolla, California. He was the first artist to receive the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award in 1984.
Residing on the West Coast, Irwin began his career in the late 1950s making Abstract Expressionist paintings which were at first gestural and intense and then developed into minimal studies in form and color, sometimes on shaped canvases. His interest in perceptual phenomena soon took him beyond notions of object making and the studio, and he began to make art in response to a particular site, or to a set of conditions, switching his focus to energy and process rather than material and object.
A leading exponent of the ‘Light and Space’ movement, Irwin’s installations employed light, string, and scrim to create subtle alterations in physical space. Architectural in scale, his works emphasized and exposed particular spatial and perceptual experiences, for example by painting walls a particular color; suspending panels to create a focused space beneath; or using taut panels of material scrim to change and intervene in specific architectural details. Panels of scrim stretched on wooden frames were also used to create sequential walls or chambers, whose color was manipulated and harnessed to potent effect, using colored gels over fluorescent lights. In this way, a physically perceptual passage for the viewer was created through works that, instead of emphasizing their presence, receded through their light translucency and acted like brackets for our phenomenological experience.
From the early 1980s, Irwin became well known for his public works which reacted to the specific conditions of a particular site, often making use of features such as the surrounding architecture, topography or indigenous flora.
Robert Irwin was born in 1928 in Long Beach, California, and lived and worked in La Jolla, California. He was the first artist to receive the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award in 1984.
