Background
Irwin was born in Long Beach, California, United States, September 12, 1928.
1962
Robert Irwin in the studio working on an early line painting.
1969
Robert Irwin and James Turrell inside the anechoic chamber at UCLA.
2015
San Diego, California, United States
Robert Irwin photographed in his studio in San Diego.
9045 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles, California 90045, United States
Otis College of Art and Design.
24700 McBean Pkwy, Valencia, California 91355, United States
California Institute of the Arts.
Los Angeles, California 90095, United States
University of California, Los Angeles.
Irvine, California 92697, United States
University of California, Irvine.
Irwin was born in Long Beach, California, United States, September 12, 1928.
Robert Irwin studied at the Otis Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design) during 1948-1950, in 1950-1952 at the Jepson Art Institute, and from 1952-1954 he attended the Chouinard Art Institute (now part of the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles. During those early years, Irwin created his paintings in the prevailing Abstract Expressionist style.
He received Honorary Doctorates from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979 and the Otis College of Art and Design in 1992.
Irwin first exhibited his paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1957. The exhibit was called "Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity." The same year, the artist participated in the 57th Annual Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, and also had his first solo exhibition at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles.
Starting from the year 1959, he joined the Ferus Gallery, whose followers included its cofounder Ed Kienholz as well as painters Ed Moses, Craig Kauffman, and Billy Al Bengston. Over the seven years of his connection with the Gallery, Irwin’s style radically evolved from gestural painting to Minimalism and then he started to create installation and sculpture. He thus joined the California Light and Space movement, together with Doug Wheeler and James Turrell. Robert Irwin’s installation pieces focused on the sensory experience and his role in guiding the viewer’s perception of the artwork. Among his early significant works was his “discs” series (1965-1969), in which Irwin used his own method of installation and manipulation of light and paint. Meanwhile, Irwin started to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles (1962).
In 1965 Irwin participated in an exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at another one called XIII in Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil. In the year 1966 Robert Irwin had both his individual and group exhibition with Kenneth Price at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Later presented his artworks as an individual exhibitor at The Pace Gallery in New York. Robert Irwin began to teach classes at the University of California, Irvine in 1968.
He began producing what he later termed "site-conditioned" works. For those installations, the artist attempted to draw the viewer’s attention to the site in which his artwork was made and then to the art’s response to the light and environment. Fractured Light - Partial Scrim - Eye Level Wire (1970-1971) presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City is one of examples of his early “site-conditioned” work. During his exhibition at MoMA he was given a dull, fluorescent-lit room. He transformed it by using cool- and warm-hued bulbs, a scrim, and wire. Though his innovation did not receive much attention at the time, that work was crucial in Irwin’s artistic trajectory and later became a recognized landmark in the art world.
For the next five years, Robert Irwin exhibited individually at the following locations: the Pace Gallery in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Fogg Art Museum on the Harvard Campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and Palomar College in San Marcos, California.
By 1972 the artist had totally abandoned his studio practice and began to create installations, using light and space. Besides his installation work, Robert Irwin wrote theory (Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Conditional Art, 1985) and generated landscape projects. Over the course of his long career, Robert Irwin has created more than 50 site-conditioned projects, ranging from the Central Garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the master plan and landscape design for Dia: Beacon in Beacon, New York, to major works at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, organized the first retrospective of Irwin's career in 1993. 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. In 2008, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented another retrospective covering fifty years of Irwin's career as an artist. Since 1966 he has been represented by Pace Gallery, New York. Robert Irwin currently lives and works in San Diego, California.
Untitled
Orange, Black Painting with Blue Edge, and Burgundy
Untitled
Scrim veil/Black rectangle/Natural light (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)
All That Jazz
Piccadilly
Untitled
Untitled
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue
Column
Untitled
Untitled
Palladium
Sophisticated Lady
Black³
Kenny Price
Portland Rose
Light column
Quotations:
"Gardening always has been an art, essentially."
"There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment."
"Don't underestimate the importance of the entrance to your home. It helps define the quality of your property when people enter. If your entrance exudes richness, buyers will think of your home as a rich property and be prepared to make offers accordingly."
"If you wanted to watch me work, it would be totally boring. It would look like a Warhol film where nothing happens. I sit for 24 hours, then I scratch myself."
"Inexpensive new carpet always looks better than the best old carpet."
"For the next week, try the best you can to pay attention to sounds. You will start hearing all these sounds coming in. Once you let them in, you've already done the first and most critical thing, you've honored that information by including it. And by doing that, you've actually changed the world."
"You can trace the course of a neighborhood with how the schools have done."
Robert Irwin was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007.