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.
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 An Art Show Celebrates a Once-Maligned Material: Plastic 16 February 2017, The New York Times 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' 2 August 2016, Frieze 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...
