| Robert Irwin | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 12, 1928 |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Painting, Installation art, Site-Specific Art |
| Movement | Light and Space |
| Influenced by | John McLaughlin, Barnett Newman |
| Influenced | Tara Donovan, Olafur Eliasson |
Robert Irwin (born September 12, 1928) is an American Installation artist. He lives and works in San Diego, California.
Contents |
Robert Irwin was born in 1928 in Long Beach, California to Robert Irwin and Goldie Anderberg Irwin. 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.
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) Robert 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.”
He 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.” Robert 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:
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 Robert Irwin's work was experienced. He told Jori Finkel of the New York Times in 2007 that people still come up to him at lectures for book autographs. In that article, Michael Govan, the director of LACMA who 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.”[1]
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 that 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 the years 1966-1967, he began painting aluminum discs. He was invited back as an individual exhibitor to The Pace Gallery in New York. In 1968, he began teaching at the University of California at 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.[2] 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.
Since 1968[3] Irwin has focused on the site itself by creating installations in rooms, gardens, parks, museums, and various urban locales.[4] 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 Robert 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, Maria Nordman, and others.
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.[5] For Soft Wall, a 1974 installation at Pace Gallery in New York, 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.[6] A permanent wall installation in the entrance corridor of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, the dimensions of Untitled (1980) exactly repeat those of the deep-set windows just opposite.[7] In the early 1980s, Irwin was invited to participate as a collaborating artist in designs for the rejuvenation and improvement of the Miami International Airport. In 1997 he transformed a room that overlooks the Pacific at the La Jolla branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.[8] To celebrate its 125th anniversary, the Indianapolis Museum of Art commissioned Irwin to create Light and Space III (2008), thereby becaming the first American museum to have a permanent indoor installation of the artist. For the piece, Irwin arranged fluorescent light bulbs in an irregular grid pattern across the walls surrounding the escalators, with a veil of scrim framing each side; as museum visitors go up and down between floors, they move through the piece.[9]
Other installations include: Fractured Light – Partial Scrim – Eye Level at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970-1971); Black Line Room Division + Extended Forms at the Whitney Museum, New York (1977); 48 Shadow Planes at the Old Post Office, Washington, D.C. (1983); Ascending at the Musee d’ Art Moderne de Ville, Paris, France (1994); and Double Diamond' at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997-1998).[10]
Irwin moved on to landscape projects after developing a stylistic move towards experiential space, projecting what he learned about line, color, and most of all, light onto the built environment. Since 1975 Irwin has conceived of fifty-five site projects. 9 Spaces 9 Trees (1980–3) was originally commissioned in 1980 for the rooftop of the Public Safety Building by the Seattle Arts Commission; it was re-imagined in 2007 and sited on campus at the University of Washington. Irwin's Filigreed Line (1979) made for Wellesley College, Massachusetts, consists of a stainless steel line, running along a ridge of grass near a lake, in which a pattern of leaflike forms is cut. His 1983 work Two Running Violet V Forms, two crossing blue-violet, plastic coated wire fences fixed with high poles, is featured as part of the Stuart Collection of public artwork on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. For Sentinel Plaza (1990) in Pasadena, California, Irwin chose small desert plants and cacti. He later consulted on the master plan for Dia:Beacon, creating, in particular, the design and landscaping of the outdoor spaces, and the entrance building and the window design.[11]
He later designed and developed the Central Garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, built in 1997. In the Central Garden, Irwin’s concept of integrating experiential relationships to the built environment is abundantly clear. Those experiential elements fill the space. This project is widely praised for its design and flow. The 134,000-square-foot (12,400 m2) design features a natural ravine and tree-lined walkway that leads the visitor through an experience of sights, sounds, and scents. He selected everything in the garden to accentuate the interplay of light, color, and reflection. Planning began in 1992, as a key part of the Getty Center project. Since the Center opened in 1997, the Central Garden has evolved as its plants have grown. Irwin's statement, "Always changing, never twice the same," is carved into the plaza floor, reminding visitors of the ever-changing nature of this living work of art. To the artist's dismay, a 1950s Fernand Léger sculpture was placed on the garden's plaza.[12]
Irwin recently completed the second phase of the installation of a primordial Palm Garden at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which began in 2007.[13]
Irwin first exhibited paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1957. The exhibit was called “Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity.” That same year, he participated in the 57th Annual Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. That same year, he had his first individual exhibition at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles.
In 1965, he participated in an exhibition called The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at another called XIII in Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil. In 1966, he exhibited both as an individual and with Kenneth Price at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and as an individual exhibitor later at The Pace Gallery in New York. In 1969, Irwin exhibited with Doug Wheeler at the Fort Worth Art Center in Fort Worth, Texas. In 1970, he first exhibited scrim “volumes” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For the next five years, he exhibited individually at the following locations: the Pace Gallery in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Minuzo and Ace Galleries in Los Angeles, the Fogg Art Museum on the Harvard Campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Fort Worth Art Center, and Palomar College in San Marcos, California. He participated in several joint exhibitions: “Transparency, Reflection, Light, Space: Four Artists” at the UCLA Art Gallery in Los Angeles and “Some Recent American Art” at the Museum of Modern Art exhibition for Australia. He also exhibited internationally: “Kompas IV” at Stedelijk Museum in Eindhoven, with other artists, Bell and Wheeler, at the Tate Gallery in London, and Documenta at Kassel in Germany.
In 1993, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted the first comprehensive retrospective of Irwin's career; the exhibition later traveled to the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.[14] In 2008, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented another comprehensive retrospective spanning fifty years of Irwin's career.
Irwin has been represented by The Pace Gallery, New York, since 1966.
Irwin was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984, thereby becaming the first artist to receive the five-year fellowship, which lasted until 1989. He has also been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), the Chaloner award, the James D. Phelan award (1954), and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation medal in architecture awarded by the University of Virginia School of Architecture (2009). He holds Honorary Doctorates from the San Francisco Art Institute (1979) and the Otis College of Art and Design (1992). Irwin was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007. That same year he had a residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.[15]
Irwin's work is held in more than thirty public collections worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.