Robert Irwin

Robert Irwin: Primaries

and Secondaries

Museum of Contemporary Art

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San Diego

Through April 13, 2008

Robert Irwin is one of those rare artists who has “set the culture on its ear,” said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. After beginning in the 1950s as an abstract painter, Irwin became synonymous in the 1960s with the light-and-space movement, which used novel new materials and techniques to upset viewers’ perceptions. “Art, which we habitually regard as a physical object, dematerialized into heightened, ineffable experience.” Now San Deigo’s Museum of Contemporary Art is celebrating his career with “an eloquent, tightly focused, and sometimes startlingly beautiful” retrospective that also introduces several new works. “It suggests we have much more left to see from this robust artist.”

Irwin first began to play with perception as a painter, said Robert L. Pincus in The San Diego Union-Tribune. His series of acrylic discs from 1969 are logic-defying constructions that hang on a wall but seem to disappear into it, becoming mere constructs of light and shadow. His works since have extended and expanded his experiments. In the room-size Five x Five, black and white scrims “are arranged in vertical rows, reaching nearly to the ceiling, and are akin to abstract paintings in three dimensions.” The candy-colored Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue3 creates a similar effect using polished aluminum metal panels. The title, which refers to “a famous painting by Barnett Newman,” proves Irwin hasn’t forgotten his artistic roots. But this sweeping survey shows that he’s far from out of new ideas, even as it “confirms Irwin’s standing as one of the greatest living artists.”