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Artist Profile Details

Robert Irwin

(American , b. 1928 )

Robert Irwin has been one of the pivotal artists in American Art for more than 46 years both as a practitioner, a theoretician, and a teacher. Irwin began his career as an abstract expressionist; however, by the late 1960s he had moved away from painting to become one of the creators of the art of light and space, using ephemeral materials such as scrim, lighting and orientation to alter and heighten the viewers' perception of the space in which they encountered his work. Since the early 80s Irwin has won an international reputation for his "site-generated" works in public spaces, which often make intimate use of site conditions, architecture, natural elements, plantings and topographic features.

Robert Irwin was born in 1928 and grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended Dorsey High School. He received his art education at Otis Art Institute, Jepsons Art Institute and Chouinards Art Institute (1948-1954). Later, Mr. Irwin taught at Chouinards (1957-58), University of California, Los Angeles (1962), and in 1968-69, he developed the graduate program at the University of California, Irvine, working with a number of now successful artists such as Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Vija Celmins, Alexis Smith and Chris Burden among others.

Beginning in 1970 (with the end of his practice as a studio artist), Irwin's method of teaching became exclusively in response, developing a peripatetic form of accepting invitations to lecture or participate in seminars and symposia in the art, architecture, philosophy and perceptual psychology departments of over 150 universities in 48 states. Along the way Robert Irwin has been the John J. Hill professor at the University of Minnesota (1981); the J. Paul Getty lecturer at the University of Southern California (1986); the Cullinan professor at Rice University (1987-88); the Andrew Ritchie lecturer at Yale University (1988); and the Yaseen lecturer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1990); and the Kiley lecturer at Harvard University (2001).

In the early years following art school (1958-68) Irwin practiced as a painter, a period marked by a series of radical reductions in the "highly stylized learned logic of pictorial reality." Today these paintings are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In 1970 Irwin broke with painting and embarked on an extended inquiry of an art outside the traditional frame and object; working by invitation in existing spaces, Irwin created a series of ephemeral interventions now referred to as the distinctly west coast art of light and space. These works were created in such places as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of America Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Pace Gallery, New York. A facet of this work continues to be present with more recent installations (1994-95) at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Dia Center for the Arts, New York. Since the 1980s, Irwin's continued questioning for the "pure subject of art" has carried him to an inquiry of the actual role of art in the light of a radical "modern" art history. This exploration has resulted in "real" world "site-generated-conditional art" proposals and projects in public places such as the Old Post Office Atrium, Washington, D.C.; Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego; a case study Arts Enrichment Master Plan; Miami International Airport; and his most recent project, the Central Gardens of the new J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles, and the architectural design and grounds for Dia Art Foundation's museum, Dia: Beacon in Beacon, New York.

Among the writings and books Mr. Irwin has published are: Robert Irwin Notes Towards A Model (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977); Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward A Conditional Art (Lapis Press, San Francisco, 1985); The Hidden Structures of Art (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 1993). A biography Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler was published by the University of California Press in 1982.

Robert Irwin has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, several honorary doctorates, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and the first artist to receive the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship ("genius") Award along the way.

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