Irwin considered perception the fundamental subject of art and sought to dismantle the boundaries between art and environment. He came to refer to his art as ‘conditional’, that is, predicated upon its existence within, and response to, the wider world around it. Beginning his career as an Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s, producing minimal studies of form and colour, he went on to develop a wide-reaching oeuvre which included notable site-specific installations involving the manipulation of light, space and the viewer’s encounter with the work of art. Irwin’s early adoption of fluorescent lights in the late 1970s revealed a predilection for increasingly subtle optical phenomena, though it was not until 2008 that they became a staple of his artistic practice. The eight wall-based sculptures on view in the galleries are a culmination of these formal and perceptual inquiries, and comprise columns of six-foot tall fluorescent tubes that are layered with coloured gels, emitting lights at various levels of brightness, obscured in places by strips of electrical tape or, sometimes, turned off altogether. Unique to each individual sculpture, the resulting hues and intensities consider juxtaposition and sequence, but also the visual interplay of colour and light. ‘The thing to realise is that the reduction was a reduction of imagery to get at physicality,’ Irwin has said, ‘a reduction of metaphor to get at presence.’

Light and its optical effects remained a preoccupation for Irwin throughout his career, but in these later works, the materials listed by the artist include not only light but ‘shadow + reflection + color’, pointing to an expansion of the limits of his concern. These sculptures – which involve concealed, dimmed or completely turned off lights – celebrate all four of these aspects of his medium while privileging none. The seven vertical fluorescent tubes in Empire #4 (2014–15), for example, gradually fade in brightness until they reach the outer edges of the sculpture. The graduated dimming and the fact that the ostensibly ‘white’ lights actually possess subtle differences in temperature, compels viewers to discern the most minute variations in brightness, colour and tone. As identified in Irwin’s medium, this choreography extends from the fluorescent tubes themselves to their emanation on the gallery walls, their reflections in metal and glass, and finally, the shadows of the hardware.

The artwork titles, which range from sparing and codified to poetic and referential, further signal Irwin’s interest in complicating artistic boundaries. Basie’s Basement (2015), for example, comes from jazz musician Count Basie’s 1992 album and invites a synaesthetic reading of the sculpture, which alternates bright green, white, grey, and ‘black’ lit tubes to produce an almost audible cadence. Sedona AZ (2015), meanwhile, deploys rhythm to a different effect, through a symmetrical procession of lit and dimmed, white and purple, fluorescent tubes that peaks with a sunny yellow at its centre. Here, the title imparts a figurative means of reading the composition, which appears inspired by, if not representative of, an Arizonan desert landscape at twilight.

The site-responsive dimension of Irwin’s practice is brought to bear by the large-scale freestanding sculpture ​​Untitled (2021), which was created with the artist’s long-time fabricator Jack Brogan. This three-metre-tall installation features six semi-transparent columns constructed from acrylic sheets of deep red, green and cool grey which, much like the artist’s fluorescent works, emphasises perception and experience as the crucible of an artistic encounter. Completed by viewership and participation, the artwork takes different forms depending on the observer’s position, with its parallel and perpendicular planes of acrylic obscuring and revealing internal colours and forms, through which glimpses of the surrounding environment are also visible. Though Irwin began working with acrylic polymer as early as the 1960s, ​​Untitled stands as both testament to the artist’s formal explorations and a monument to human experience, at once formidably solid and evanescent, if not immaterial.

Robert Irwin was born in 1928 in Long Beach, California. He lived and worked in La Jolla, California, where he died in 2023. He exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Kraftwerk Berlin (2021); Pratt Institute School of Architecture, New York (2019); University Art Museum, California State University (2018); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2016); DIA:Beacon, New York (2015); Wiener Secession, Association of Visual Artists, Vienna (2013); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2007); Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2006); DIA Center for the the Arts, New York (1998); Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1998); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1993); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1993); and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1993). Selected group exhibitions include Hayward Gallery, London (2018); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2009); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1999); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (1997); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (1997); Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (1997); and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (1997). Irwin was the first artist to receive the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award in 1984.