(David) Gwyther (Broome) Irwin (7 May 1931 – 18 October 2008) was a British abstract artist born in Basingstoke, Hampshire, who had lived much of his life in north Cornwall. He was educated in Dorset, at Goldsmiths College and at the Central School of Art in London 1951–1954. Irwin first came to prominence in 1957 with an exhibition at Gallery One, and another at Gimpel Fils in 1959. In 1964, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, along with Joe Tilson, Bernard Meadows and Roger Hilton. In 1960, he married Elizabeth Gowlett and they had two sons and one daughter.
His most famous artworks consisted of pictures assembled from newsprint and fragments of advertisements on paper, which he collected from the streets with his wife, and which were then worked up into collages often of fine delicacy and quite subtle shades. Some of his later works also used string, wood shavings, chalk and paint.
"Gwyther Irwin's latest collages...are evidently miracles of patient assembly...they set out to achieve the subtlest and slowest possible shifts in tonality from umber darkness to creamy light and back again. The patience, the subtlety, the muted gradations of every effect combine to produce an atmosphere of studied beauty." (The Times, 18 September 1959)
In the 1960s he taught at art schools in Hornsey, Corsham and Chelsea before becoming head of fine art at Brighton polytechnic between 1969 and 1984.
Exhibitions Gallery One, 1957 Redfern Gallery, Metavisual Tachiste Abstract, 1957 Institute of Contemporary Arts, "Three Collagists," 1958 Gimpel Fils, 1959 Situation, London, 1960 Paris Biennale, 1960 Biennale des Jeunes, Paris, 1961 The Art of Assemblage, MoMA, New York, 1961 Gimpel Fils, 1962 Gimpel Fils, 1963, Venice Biennale, 1964 Recent British Painting, Tate Gallery, London, 1967 Two one-man exhibitions in 1975 & 1978 Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 1981 Retrospective, Gimpel Fils, 1987 John Jones Gallery, 1992 Barbican Art Gallery, 1993 Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, 1995 West of England Academy, Bristol, 1996 Tate Britain, 2004 Redfern Gallery & JHW Fine Art, London, 2006 Lemon Street Gallery, Truro, scheduled for February 2009 will now become a memorial tribute.
Bibliography Gwyther Irwin, Collage, Gimpel Fils, London, 1962, ASIN B0007KED1A Alan Bowness, Gwyther Irwin, Quadrum Books, Bruxelles, 1964, ASIN B0007KELU8 Roger Hilton, Gwyther Irwin, Bernard Meadows, Joe Tilson, An exhibition catalogue, with illustrations, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1965 Gwyther Irwin: work in progress 1957-1967, [exhibition] 5–30 September 1967, Gimpel Fils, London, 1967, ASIN B0007JX2NQ Gwyther Irwin, 7 April to 2 May 1970, Gimpel Fils, London, 1970 Nicholas Wadley, Gwyther Irwin a Retrospective, London, Gimpel Fils. 1987 Gwyther Irwin, Recent Paintings, 15 February-17 March 1994, Redfern Gallery, London, 1994
See also Mimmo Rotella
External links Gwyther Irwin at JHW fine arts Gwyther Irwin at Tate modern Gwyther Irwin: painter whose art drew his Cornish upbringing (Obituary), The Times, 25 October 2008 Magdalen Evans, Gwyther Irwin: Artist and teacher who forged a reputation as Britain's foremost collagist, The Independent, 24 October 2008