Robert Irwin (b. 1928, Long Beach, California) lives and works in San Diego, California. Major solo exhibitions include All the Rules Will Change at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2016), Primaries and Secondaries at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2007), and a large-scale retrospective organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, that traveled to the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Reina Sofía, Madrid (1993–1995). Since the early 1970s, Irwin has created site-conditioned installations at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and La Jolla; and the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, among many others. The artist has also designed major architectural and environmental installations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dia:Beacon, and the Getty Center. Irwin has received numerous awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture (2009), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (1984–1989), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976).
Text courtesy Sprüth Magers.
Related Press A walk through Robert Irwin's new 5,000-square-foot sculpture 20 February 2018, Los Angeles Times Every morning when we wake up, we put the world together anew, Robert Irwin marveled in an interview with me more than a decade ago. The painter-turned-pioneering artist of light and space had been probing how perception defines reality since the 1970s, but there he was, nearing age 80, and clearly still driven hard by that wondrous process....
Related Press At 89, Robert Irwin finds beauty in the benign (and talks about the new artwork that's not for sale — sort of) 7 February 2018, Los Angeles Times Inside a gleaming San Diego tract home, 89-year-old artist Robert Irwin reclines in his favorite leather lounge chair, snug in his favorite worn baseball cap, sipping a fizzy Coke over ice. Irwin has lived here about 15 years 'because my wife wanted kids on the block for our daughter,' he says of his now 23-year-old. Still, the cozy setting...
Related Press Speculative modernism: Robert Irwin at the Hirshhorn 12 May 2016, Art Critical All the Rules Will Change, a retrospective Robert Irwin’s art is the first to survey his oeuvre in the 1960s, and his first museum show outside of California since 1977. We get a thorough survey of his astonishingly swift development in that tumultuous decade. And there is a major new site-specific installation, Square the Circle...
Related Press Light Years Ahead: Interview with Robert Irwin 2 November 2015, Apollo Magazine In 2007, Robert Irwin (b. 1928) had a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Held in the city in which Irwin has lived since the early 1980s and curated by the museum’s director, his old friend Hugh M. Davies, the exhibition was something of a homecoming tribute for the artist. He did not know it at the time, but a chance...
