Robert Irwin, pioneering creator of light and experiential art, has died aged 95

Robert Irwin, a pioneering determine within the Californian Gentle and House Motion, and a vastly influential maker of experiential, minimal, typically site-specific and infrequently non permanent works, has died, aged 95. Irwin’s loss of life, at Scripps Memorial Hospital, was attributable to coronary heart failure, in accordance with Arne Glimcher, the founder and chairman of the worldwide Tempo Gallery, which has represented the artist since 1966.

“In my lengthy profession, I’ve been privileged to work with a few of the biggest artists of the twentieth century and develop deep friendships with them,” Glimcher mentioned, “however none higher or nearer than Robert Irwin. In our 57-year relationship, his artwork and philosophy have prolonged my notion, formed my style, and made me realise what artwork may very well be.”

Irwin latterly contributed famous large-scale design work for gallery and panorama areas for museums together with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (1997), the place he designed the terraces and gardens round Richard Meier’s sprawling new hilltop constructing, and Dia:Beacon (2005) in higher New York State.

In 2017, the Chinati Basis in Marfa, Texas, opened untitled (daybreak to nightfall), his first freestanding construction. It was 17 years in conception and noticed Irwin—in his mid-eighties by the point it was opened—remodel a former military hospital on Chinati’s campus into a ten,000 sq. ft, horseshoe-shaped set up that progresses from gentle to darkish. Home windows put in at eye degree reveal a skinny strip of panorama and an enormous expanse of the Texan sky.

The loosely aligned Gentle and House motion—the Golden State’s personal artwork faculty, whose important proponents included Irwin and James Turrell, and which developed round a really Seventies Californian deal with area and transcendence—discovered its title when the College of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) hosted Transparency, Reflection, Gentle, House: 4 Artists (1971), that includes the work of Irwin, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell and Craig Kauffman. Forty years later the Museum of Modern Artwork San Diego offered a landmark survey of the motion, Phenomenal: California Gentle, House, Floor (2011).

Irwin’s works with gentle break down in to 2 important varieties, people who handle pure gentle—typically by means of window openings, typically by means of the subtlest of net-like scrims—and installations constructed on fluorescence.

On the 1971 UCLA present, Irwin’s stairwell set up had been “activated . . . perceptually with as little occasion or object as potential”. Irwin’s piece, Peter Plagens wrote in Artforum, “is by far essentially the most bold work, as a result of on this crowd it’s the least materials (materials that means ‘gear’ or ‘glass’ or ‘plastic’) and takes essentially the most probabilities: the dense, translucent web fitted over the staircase to divert the altering daylight, provides one nearly nothing, and calls for the viewer work for sensation.”

The “dense, translucent” web of Irwin’s 1971 stairwell turned a calling card in a few of his grandest, however most minimal items. An archetypical such work is his Black rectangle—Pure gentle (1977), created for the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, New York. In 2013 Donna De Salvo, chief curator and deputy director for programmes on the Whitney, instructed The Artwork Newspaper that the spotlight of her yr had been “The honour of ­working with Robert Irwin on the re-installation of his Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Pure gentle… 36 years after it was first offered on the Whitney.” The typically ephemeral nature of Irwin‘s work was emphasised by the truth that the set up got here down once more when the museum left its Marcel Breuer-designed house on the nook of Madison Avenue and seventy fifth Avenue simply over a yr later, and moved downtown to a brand new constructing in Gansevoort Avenue.

Irwin’s untitled (daybreak to nightfall) on the Chinati Basis was an exemplar of his work with gentle and apertures, as was his first everlasting museum set up, 1° 2° 3° 4° (1997), for the Museum of Modern Artwork San Diego (the place he was an artist in residence), set within the museum’s oceanview gallery. The work’s title refers to 4 dimensions, top, width, depth and time; time being aligned with the motion of the solar, because it performs on three rectangles lower within the gallery’s tinted home windows (lighter blue in opposition to darker blue), by means of which the sea-breeze blows. It’s an experiential area, without delay playful and profound.

One among Irwin’s largest fluorescent works is Gentle and House (2007), a everlasting set up at The Museum of Modern Artwork San Diego, made up of 115 lighting tubes.

Gentle artists interviewed by The Artwork Newspaper for a current article on gentle and know-how, nearly universally cited Irwin as an necessary up to date affect. To Hannes Koch, co-founder of the European collaborative studio Random Worldwide, it was “all the time Robert Irwin”. And that affect got here not simply from Irwin’s celebrated use of sunshine, however from his research of notion—the artist‘s and the viewer‘s—and of utilizing that experiential register to contain his viewers, effortlessly and instinctively, in his works.

Irwin was born in Lengthy Seashore, south of Los Angeles, the son of a shipyard employee and served within the US navy in Europe earlier than returning to the West Coast the place, from 1948, he studied at three artwork faculties: Otis Artwork Institute, the Jepson and the Chouinard, now CalArts.

On a return journey to Europe within the mid Nineteen Fifties he toured museums, learning the Previous Masters and—nearly on a whim—took a ship to Ibiza, within the Balearic Islands, then a sleepy, bohemian idyll. There he had his first encounter with (self)-perception, spending, like some unintended Desert Father, eight months alone in an remoted cottage, conversing with nobody. It was, he later mentioned, a decisive second in his formation as an artist. “I realised I used to be within the twentieth century,” he later instructed his good friend and biographer Lawrence Weschler. “And I wasn’t in any respect considering historic types.”

Again in Los Angeles Irwin practised his personal type of Summary Expressionism and held a one-man present on the Felix Landau Gallery in 1957, whereas nonetheless trying to find his final métier. Los Angeles was prosperous however conservative within the Nineteen Fifties, with out a longtime artwork scene, however Irwin benefited from his reference to the ground-breaking Ferus Gallery in Venice Seashore, based by Walter Hopps in 1957, which helped set up the reputations of Irwin (who joined the gallery in 1958), and different equally and fiercely unbiased artists akin to Robert Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston and Ed Ruscha.

Within the Nineteen Sixties, Irwin made his particular person mark as an artist along with his spot work and his aluminium and acrylic disc items—which stand out from the wall creating shadows as a part of the gallery show—and within the Seventies along with his landmark gentle installations. He first exhibited with Tempo in 1966, presenting his dot work on the gallery’s West 57th Avenue area in New York, and featured in some 20 additional solo exhibits with the gallery, sustaining a detailed friendship with Glimcher for nearly 60 years.

In 1969 Irwin engaged in one other memorable section of his experiential voyage when the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (Lacma) invited him to work on sensory deprivation with Turrell and the perceptual scientist Edward Wortz of the Garrett Aerospace Company. Turrell famously withdrew from the experiment however Irwin took copious notes. “I really feel, due to this fact I feel, due to this fact I’m,” he as soon as mentioned.

The British-born supplier Peter Goulds instructed The Artwork Newspaper in 2011 how within the Seventies, Irwin was to be discovered on the centre of ”the dialogue within the studios of Venice… animated, artist-led conferences with collectors and curators… held within the studios of Robert Irwin, Larry Bell and Sam Francis.”

Aside from a interval working in Las Vegas, Irwin remained a Californian, dwelling and dealing in Los Angeles and San Diego. The opening of the Getty Museum in December 1997 was a really private homecoming, because the complicated is sited only a quick distance south of one among Irwin’s childhood properties in Los Angeles. His Primal Palm Backyard (2010), on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (Lacma) has turn into a metropolis landmark.

Irwin famously deserted his studio apply within the Seventies, however prior to now decade he had returned to the area, to develop new types of sculpture, utilizing fluorescent gentle and acrylic, such because the Sculpture/Configuration items (2018) and his Unlight collection (2020 and 2022), all proven at Tempo in New York.

Irwin speaks of the sometimes-ephemeral nature of his work in a brand new documentary, Robert Irwin: A Desert of Pure Feeling, which has been obtainable on streaming providers since 20 October and is to be offered as we speak on the ICA in London. “If I say to you, you can also make one thing and it’s going to be so lovely, the very best factor you have ever completed. Just one downside, it is solely going to final for 20 minutes…”

Weschler revealed the primary version of an acclaimed biography Seeing is Forgetting the Title of the Factor One Sees: A Lifetime of Modern Artist Robert Irwin in 1982, based mostly on a collection of long-form articles for the New Yorker journal; and an expanded version in 2009, the fruit of thirty years of conversations with Irwin.

Irwin’s work is at current on view at Tempo’s London gallery as a part of the two-artist presentation Robert Irwin and Mary Corse: Parallax, and A Desert of Pure Feeling.

Robert Walter Irwin, born Lengthy Seashore California 12 September 1928; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Basis fellowship 1984; member, American Academy of Arts and Letters 2007; married 1956 Nancy Olsburg (marriage dissolved); died La Jolla, San Diego, California 25 October 2023.