Robert Irwin

Robert Irwin is an artist most often linked to the Light and Space Movement in the 1960s in California, using art as a conditional response to the environment as opposed to an interruption to it. He began as a painter in the 1950s, transitioning from Abstract Expressionism to simplified Op Art, then eventually into two-dimensional metal or plastic panels that cut light and altered their surroundings. His transition toward altering interactions with nature began in the 1970s, where sheer theater scrims, industrial glass, and even landscape design was a way to demand the viewer take stock of the environment. He has conceived of 55 site-conditional projects since 1975 including the revitalization of the Miami Airport and the gardens of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, as well as the design of the interior and exterior of Dia:Beacon. Perception is Irwin’s primary medium, and each of his artworks interrogates a space in a way that is both quantitative and qualitative to incite the “end of art as a thing separated from our surrounding environment.”

The artist has exhibited at institutions including Dia:Beacon, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, White Cube, London, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, Musee d’art contemporain, Lyon, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1980 and participated in 1976 otherwise. Irwin was the first artist to receive the MacArthur Genius Award in 1984.