Band in Boston
Robert Irwin
ROBERT IRWIN, 1962. OIL ON CANVAS.
Painting was the not the medium that would come to define Irwin’s practice, but the same ideas, same themes, same grasps towards the unanswerable and unknowable are present here. Irwin was one of the leaders of the ‘Light and Space’ movement, alongside James Turrell, that shaped California’s post war art scene. In the late 60s, he moved away from works on canvas to create site-specific instillations and dynamic sculptures made with illuminated rods of neon and halogen bulbs. Yet we see, in this simple canvas, the architectural enquiry that existed in his practice across mediums. The square is broken up by simple, irregularly spaced lines – it is elegant and beautiful but we cannot quite understand why. “This world is not just somehow given to us whole.”, said Robert Irwin, ‘We perceive, we shape the world, and as artists we discover and give value to our human potential to ‘see’ the infinite richness in everything, creating an extended aesthetic reality.”