Robert Walter Irwin (September 12, 1928 – October 25, 2023) was an American installation artist who explored perception and the conditional in art, often through site-specific, architectural interventions that alter the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space.
Irwin began his career as a painter in the 1950s, but in the 1960s shifted to installation work, becoming a pioneer whose work helped to define the aesthetics and conceptual issues of the West Coast Light and Space movement. His early works often employed light and veils of scrim to transform gallery and museum spaces, but from 1975 until his death, he also incorporated landscape projects into his practice. Irwin conceived over fifty-five site-specific projects, at institutions including the Getty Center (1992–98), Dia:Beacon (1999–2003), and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (2001–16). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted the first retrospective of his work in 1993; in 2008, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented another, spanning fifty years of his career. Irwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, a MacArthur Fellowship in March 1984, and was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007. He lived and worked in San Diego, California.
Beginnings Robert Walter Irwin was born on September 12, 1928, in Long Beach, California, to Overton Ernest Irwin and Goldie née Anderberg. Overton was a gold miner from Colorado who moved to California to work in shipyards. Goldie was a devout Mormon, born in Provo, Utah. Overton became a contractor in the 1920s, but went out of business in the 1930s, when Robert was growing up. Overton later worked for the local department of water and power.
Robert grew up in the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles, and graduated from Dorsey High School. After serving in the United States Army from 1946 to 1947, he attended several art institutes: Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1948 to 1950, Jepson Art Institute in 1951, and Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1952 to 1954. He spent the next two years living in Europe and North Africa. Between the years 1957–1958, he taught at the Chouinard Art Institute.
Work In 1977, Robert Irwin wrote the following about himself: "I began as a painter in the middle of nowhere with few questions...My first real question concerned the arbitrariness of my paintings… I used my paintings as a step-by-step process, each new series of works acting in direct response to those questions raised by the previous series. I first questioned the mark as meaning and then even as focus; I then questioned the frame as containment, the edge as the beginning and end of what I see...consider the possibility that nothing ever really transcends its immediate environment...I tried to respond directly to the quality of each situation I was in, not to change it wholesale into a new or ideal environment, but to attend directly to the nature of how it already was. How is it that a space could ever come to be considered empty when it is filled with real and tactile events?" (Robert Irwin, 1977). Irwin's notion of art derived from a series of experiential perceptions. As an abstract, open-minded thinker, he presented experience first as perception or sense. He concluded that a sense of knowing, or ability to identify, helped to clarify perception. For example,
"We know the sky's blueness even before we know it as "blue", let alone as "sky."
Irwin explained later that the conception of an abstract thought occurs in the mind, through the concept of self. Following, the physical form is then recognized, communicating the form to the community. Then, the Objective compound occurs, delineating behavioral norms and artistic norms, becoming identifiable. Then the boundaries and axioms introduce logic and reasoning and decisions can be made: either inductive or deductive. Formalism follows, proving and convincing a decision about the object being perceived. The study done by Irwin suggested that: "…all ideas and values have their roots in experience,… they can be held separate at any point and developed directly on the grounds of function and use, both that they in fact remain relative to the condition of both our subjective and objective being." Irwin's philosophy defined his idea of art as a series of aesthetic inquiries, an opportunity for cultural innovation, a communicative interaction with society, and as compounded historical development.
In his book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler documents Irwin's process from his early days as a youngster in Southern California to his emergence as a leader in the post-abstraction art world. Weschler describes the mystifying and often enchanting quality of these works in his book's cover notes:
"In May 1980, Robert Irwin returned to Market Street in Venice, California to the block where he had kept a studio until 1970, the year he abandoned studio work altogether. Melinda Wyatt was opening a gallery in the building next door to his former work space and invited Irwin to create an installation."
"He cleaned out the large rectangular room, adjusted the skylights, painted the walls an even white, and then knocked out the wall facing the street, replacing it with a sheer, semi-transparent white scrim. The room seemed to change its aspect with the passing day: people came and sat on the opposite curb, watching, sometimes for hours at time."
"The piece was up for two weeks in one of the more derelict beachfront neighborhoods of Los Angeles: no one so much as laid a hand on it."
Because of the ephemeral or subtle nature of his work, this book became not just an introduction but, for many artists and art students, the primary way that Irwin's work was experienced. He told Jori Finkel of the New York Times in 2007 that people still came up to him at lectures for book autographs. In that article, Michael Govan, the director of LACMA who had previously commissioned Irwin to "design our experience" of Dia:Beacon said he believes the book "has convinced more young people to become artists than the Velvet Underground has created rockers."Jori Finkel (October 24, 2007), "Artist of Space, Light, and Now Trees" New York Times.
Painting Irwin's early work began with painting. In 1959, he painted a series of hand-held objects and exhibited for the second time, as an individual exhibitor, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The following year, 1960, he was asked to exhibit there again as well as at the Pasadena Art Museum. By this time, he began a continuous series of experiments. In 1962, he began teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles and exhibited at the Ferus Gallery again. That year, he began his line paintings. He exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in 1964 and presented a different study, his dot paintings.
Between 1966 and 1967, he began painting aluminum discs. He was invited back as an individual exhibitor to The Pace Gallery in New York City. In 1968, he began teaching at the University of California, Irvine. For the next two years, he started his work with clear acrylic discs, white convex structures fixed to the wall and illuminated by lamps.Robert Irwin: Untitled, 1968–69 Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. In 1970, he began his work on "Columns", a series of clear acrylic columns. In 1972, he began his study on "sightlines" and "places" in the Southwest.
Light works Irwin first used fluorescent light in the 1970s.Robert Irwin: Cacophonous, April 10, 2015 – May 9, 2015 Pace Gallery, New York. His site-conditioned installation Excursus: Homage to the Square3, a meditation on the painter Josef Albers and his explorations of color relationships,Grace Glueck (November 13, 1998), On a Journey Through a Maze, Contemplating Light and Color New York Times. was presented at Dia:Chelsea between 1998 and 2000. It consists of 18 small rooms, divided by walls of tautly stretched scrim; the light in each room, its value depending on the distance from the windows, is enhanced by four white-and-colored double fluorescent bulbs, each hung vertically at the center of each wall. In 2015, it was reinstalled at Dia:Beacon where it was on view through 2017. For a 2015 exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York City, Irwin installed rows of columnar lights, coating the different tubes with colored gels that alter the transmission of light.
His later exhibitions included: Unlights at Kayne Griffin in Los Angeles, January 9 – February 27, 2021 and Light and Space commissioned by Light Art Space (LAS) and displayed at Kraftwerk Berlin from December 5, 2021 to January 30, 2022. "Irwin's new works are composed from unlit six-foot fluorescent lights mounted to fixtures and installed in vertical rows directly on the wall. The glass tubes are covered in layers of opulently colored translucent gels and thin strips of electrical tape, allowing the reflective surfaces of unlit glass and anodized aluminum to interact with ambient illumination in the surrounding space and produce shifting patterns of shadow and chromatic tonality. Reflecting his recent turn toward the perceptual possibilities of unlit bulbs, Irwin's new body of work expands the range of possibilities for how we experience sensations of rhythm, pulsation, expansion and intensity, while continuing the artist's long-standing interest in registering the immediacy of our own presence in space."
Installations From 1968Robert Irwin MoMA Collection, New York. Irwin focused on the site itself by creating installations in rooms, gardens, parks, museums, and various urban locales."Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present", March 5 – May 19, 2004 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Influenced, in particular, by the paintings of John McLaughlin, Irwin and other Light and Space artists became curious about pushing the boundaries of art and perception, in the 1970s Irwin left studio work to pursue installation art that dealt directly with light and space: the basis of visual perception, in both outdoor and modified interior sites. These installations allowed for an open exploration for artist and viewer of an altered experience created by manipulating the context of environment rather than remaining with the confines of an individual work of art. Other artists involved in the Light and Space movement include John McCracken, James Turrell, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, Doug Wheeler, and Maria Nordman.
In 1970, the Museum of Modern Art invited Irwin to create an installation. Using the entire project space, Irwin suspended a white scrim 10 feet from the ground and attached shimmering stainless steel wires to the wall. In 1971 the Walker Art Center commissioned the artist to create Untitled (Slant/Light/Volume) for the inaugural exhibition of its Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building.Robert Irwin: Slant/Light/Value, August 6, 2009 – February 28, 2010 Walker Art Center. Suspended between the floor and ceiling, his Full Room Skylight - Scrim V (1972/2022) comprises two sheets of translucent fabric stretched in a “V” shape across two connected galleries; from overhead, the fabric is illuminated by abundant natural light beaming through the skylights, both concealing and revealing the surrounding architecture depending on variables such as brightness, time of day, and the viewer's vantage point.Henri Neuendorf (2 September 2022), Robert Irwin’s 1972 Fogg Museum scrim installation revived in its 'ideal location' at Dia Beacon The Art Newspaper. For Soft Wall, a 1974 installation at Pace Gallery in New York City, Irwin simply cleaned and painted a rectangular gallery and hung a thin, translucent white theater scrim eighteen inches in front of one of the long walls, creating the effect of an empty room in which one wall seemed permanently out of focus.Robert Irwin Dia:Beacon.