Irwin has been experimenting with columnar forms made from transparent materials since the 1960s, and these latest works offer a survey of the current state of this important valence of his larger practice. Illusionistic, layered, and multicolored, Irwin’s columns evoke the energetic potentiality of light itself, capturing the radiance of color almost as a physical entity and gesturing to the subjective nature of experience as well as the shared conditions of human perception.
Robert Irwin has for the past six decades positioned himself as one of the world’s most influential and central contemporary artists. He started his career in the late 1950s, painting hand-held objects in dialogue with Abstract Expressionism, before he started experimenting with different materials in the 1960s. He became a legend on the West Coast art scene as he pioneered the L.A.-based “Light and Space” movement in the 1960s, underlining the contextual experience with art, and the artwork’s existence in the real world. While regarded as one of the preeminent pioneers of California Minimalism and the Los Angeles Light and Space movement, his attention to location and viewer’s affect establishes him as a forefather of site-specificity and relational aesthetics.
Irwin’s work can be found in more than thirty public collections worldwide, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Irwin’s strong presence in these most prestigious institutions underlines his legendary status and pivotal role as one of the founders of the theoretical and formal bases of contemporary art.
