Ocula Report Havana Biennial 2019: Constructing the Possible 17 Apr 2019 : Federica Bueti for Ocula I first visited Havana in November 2016, a few days after Fidel Castro died, and just under a year before Hurricane Irma hit Cuba in September 2017. Since then, much has changed, including the hand-painted signs that punctuate the journey from the airport to the city centre, which today do not celebrate the revolution so much as the 'Unidad y...
Ocula Conversation Andrew Stahl and Guo Xiaohui The exhibition Beyond Boundaries at Somerset House in London (12 March–2 April 2019) marked the historic contributions of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, on the occasion of their 100th and 150th anniversaries, respectively. Spread across several rooms of Somerset House's...
Ocula Report The National 2019: New Australian Art 13 Apr 2019 : Elyse Goldfinch for Ocula The National 2019: New Australian Art features work by 70 contemporary Australia-based artists split across three venues: the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) (29 March–21 July 2019), as curated by Isobel Parker Philip, curator of photographs at AGNSW; Daniel Mudie Cunningham,...
For more than six decades, Robert Irwin (b. 1928, Long Beach, California) has explored perception as the fundamental issue of art. Irwin, who began his career as a painter in the 1950s and became the pioneer of the L.A.-based Light and Space movement in the 1960s, has, through a continual breaking down of the frame, come to regard the role of art as “conditional,” or something that works in and responds to the specific surrounding world of experience. Irwin has conceived fifty-five site-conditional projects since 1975, ranging from the architectural and grounds design of Dia: Beacon Center for the Arts (completed in 2003) to the lush Central Gardens for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California (completed in 2005). Robert Irwin became the first artist to receive the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1984.
Robert IrwinHarlem Nocturne, 2014–2015 Light + Shadow + Reflection + Colour
Robert IrwinLegacy, 2014–2015 Light + Shadow + Reflection + Colour
Related Press A walk through Robert Irwin's new 5,000-square-foot sculpture Los Angeles Times : 20 February 2018 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.Irwin...
Related Press At 89, Robert Irwin finds beauty in the benign (and talks about the new artwork that's not for sale — sort of) Los Angeles Times : 7 February 2018 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 seems...
Related Press An Art Show Celebrates a Once-Maligned Material: Plastic The New York Times : 16 February 2017 When DeWain Valentine was deciding what to title his newly organized Plastic Show, he paid homage to an exhibition he helped put together some 45 years back. 'I named that The Last Plastics Show,' recalls the artist of the earlier CalArts exhibition. 'There'd been so many shows regarding plastic and art that I thought it was the last one that I...
Related Press 'Blackness in Abstraction' Frieze : 2 August 2016 The thesis underlying Blackness in Abstraction – arguably the marquee gallery show of the season – was first articulated in 2015 by curator Adrienne Edwards, in an eponymous essay for Art in America. In it, she argued that: ‘Blackness, in the fullest sense of the word, has a seemingly unlimited usefulness in the history of...
