Robert Irwin
Way Out West
May 4, 2013 – October 26, 2013
Peder Lund is honoured to present an exhibition of new light works by the American West-Coast artist Robert Irwin (b. 1928, Long Beach, California). On display are eight works, of which seven are being exhibited for the first time, and have come directly from the artist’s studio. The exhibition opens May 4, 2013 and will be on display until October 26, 2013.
Robert Irwin has for the past six decades positioned himself as one of the world’s most influential and central con- temporary artists. Irwin started his career in the late 1950s, painting hand-held objects in dialogue with Abstract Expressionism. Unwilling to confine to what had already been done in the history of art he began experimenting with materials in the 1960s. Irwin threw himself into studies of philosophy and art history and theory, introducing works that intellectually explored the interaction between artwork and beholder, through site-specific installations. He became a legend on the West Coast art scene as he pioneered the L.A.-based “Light and Space” movement in the 1960s, under- lining the contextual experience with art, and the artwork’s existence in the real world. Since 1975, Irwin has installed more than fifty site-conditional projects in rooms, gardens, parks, museums, and other various urban locations. His light installations confront the viewer to be in direct dialogue with the work in its particular environment, and with the physical environment directly, in the process breaking down the limits of the framed artwork. This theoretical introduction of the experience and perception of a work of art, is what Irwin has termed “conditional art,” a philosophical position he has explored both through installations and writing.
Irwin’s work is to be found in more than thirty public collections worldwide, most recently in the Albright-Knox Gallery, where his work Niagara was installed in 2012. The works on display at Peder Lund are in the same technique as Niagara.