Artist Robert Irwin Speaks At Mills College

The Mills College Department of Art and Art History is pleased to announce that the annual Correnah W. Wright guest lecture will be given by San Diego-based artist Robert Irwin on February 11, at 7:30 pm in the Littlefield Concert Hall, Music Building, at Mills College.

Robert Irwin has been one of the pivotal artists in American art for more than 46 years both as a practitioner, a theoretician, and a teacher. Irwin began his career as an abstract expressionist, however, by the late 1960s he had moved away from painting to become one of the creators of the art of light and space, using ephemeral materials such as scrim, lighting and orientation to alter and heighten the viewer’s perception of the space in which his work was encountered. Since the early 1980s Irwin has won an international reputation for his "site-generated" works in public spaces, which often make intimate use of site conditions, architecture, natural elements, plantings and topographic features.

Robert Irwin was born in 1928 and grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended Dorsey High School. He received his art education at Otis Art Institute, Jepsons Art Institute and Chouinards Art Institute (1948-1954). Later, Irwin taught at Chouinards (1957-58), University of California, Los Angeles (1962), and in 1968-69 he developed the graduate program at the University of California, Irvine, working with a number of now successful artists such as Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Vija Celmins, Alexis Smith and Chris Burden among others.

In the early years following art school (1958-68) Irwin practiced as a painter, a period marked by a series of radical reductions in the "highly stylized learned logic of pictorial reality." Today these paintings are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In 1970 Irwin broke with painting and embarked on an extended inquiry of an art outside the traditional frame and object; working by invitation in existing spaces, Irwin created a series of ephemeral interventions now referred to as the distinctly West Coast art of light and space. These works were created in such places as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of America Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and The Pace Gallery, New York.

Since the 1980s, Irwin’s continued questioning for the "pure subject of art" has carried him to an inquiry of the actual role of art in the light of a radical "modern" art history. This exploration has resulted in "real" world "site-generated-conditional art" proposals and projects in public places such as the Old Post Office Atrium, Washington, D.C., Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego, a case study Arts Enrichment Master Plan, Miami International Airport, and his most recent project, the Central Gardens of the new J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles, and the architectural design and grounds for Dia Art Foundation's museum, Dia: Beacon in Beacon, New York.

Robert Irwin has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, several honorary doctorates, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and was the first artist to receive the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship ("genius") Award.

Each year the Mills College Department of Art and Art History sponsors a practicing artist for the Correnah W. Wright lecture. The annual event allows undergraduate and graduate students in studio art and art history an opportunity to meet and interact with some of the top artists in the country. More information about this art program is available at www.mills.edu/art.


Image: Robert Irwin, Light and Space (installation view), 2007. 115 Fluorescent lights. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Museum purchase with funds from the Annenberg Foundation. Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann.


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