Robert Irwin, artist of light and space, dies at 95

2023-11-20 12:43:42

Through the North American press, and through Pace and Sprüth Magers, two of the galleries that have dealt with his work, we learned of the death due to heart failure, in La Jolla, and the 95 years of age, of Robert Irwin. A native of Long Beach, and trained in various Californian art schools, he began his career as a painter during the 1950s (part of which vHe lived in Europe, Ibiza included), and in an abstract expressionist key. After a first individual in 1957, with Felix Landau, from the following year the legendary Ferus Gallery, founded by the pop artist Kienholz, and Walter Hopps, took care of his work. Rooms both fundamental for the emergence of a certain Los Angeles ‘cool’much revisited today, and in whose figurative aspect Ed Ruscha would shine.

During the sixties, Irwin became considerably radicalized, approaching the kineticism and minimalism, with its monochromes, its line paintings or its reliefs, or its neon pieces, gas with many followers in the scene of its country. In 1967 he participated in ‘The Responsive Eye’, the seminal kinetic collective from the New York MoMA. Abandoning traditional supports, he then worked in nature, or in public spaces such as the museums of San Diego and Indianapolis, the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles (for which he designed a garden), the LACMA also in Los Angeles, or the Cinati Foundation of Marfa.

Central figure of the Art and Space movement, influenced Mary Corse (a joint exhibition of her and Irwin has just closed at Pace’s London headquarters), Keith Sonnier, James Turrell and Doug Wheeler. More recently, it has been claimed by Chris Burden, Vija Celmins and Olafur Eliasson. They all admire him as someone capable of transmitting, with his installations (and with his writings and conferences), serenity, concentration, faith in the possibilities of an art in intimate communion with nature.

Important for Irwin’s critical fortune was the biography that Lawrence Weschler dedicated to him in 1982, and which was published by California University Press. Weschler, one of the great narrators of the North American scene, masterful in his portraits and in his ‘quests’, knew how to explain the uniqueness of the Irwin case, to which throughout the following years he would dedicate numerous essays, and a book of conversations. A few days ago, he told us, while passing through Madrid, that a few months ago he had visited the artist, and that, despite his advanced age, he was in shape, and devising new projects.

Among Irwin’s retrospectives, the one that took place in 1993 at the MoCA in Los Angeles, he then traveled to Cologne, Paris, and Madrid, in the Queen Sofiawhere in their catalog they wrote Weschler and Enrique Juncosa. In 2016 his early work was revisited by the Hirschorn of Washington. Also remember his unique and dazzling individual here, held in 2011 in Elvira González.