Lot 64: Robert Irwin (b. 1928)

Robert Irwin (b. 1928)
Untitled
oil on canvas
84½ x 82 7/8 in. (214.6 x 210.5 cm.)
Painted in 1963-1964.

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, 7 New Artists, May 1964.
Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; Cologne, Museum Ludwig; Mus©e d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Robert Irwin, 1993-1995.

Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles
Sterling Holloway, Los Angeles
Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1984

A pioneer of the West Coast Light and Space movement in the 1960s, Robert Irwin has been a very pivotal figure in American art of the past five decades. As a painter and sculptor, as a theorist and teacher, Irwin has contributed to a critical shift in the parameters of art-making, focusing not just on art as a discrete object but on the viewer's perceptual experience of the surrounding environment. In his formative paintings of the 1960s, Irwin mined the themes of sensual and visual perception, which he has continued to explore in his sculptures and site-specific installations up to the present day.

Raised in Los Angeles, Irwin studied at the Otis Art Institute in the late 1940s and at the progressive Chouinard Institute in the early 1950s. There, although geographically removed from the New York School -- "in the middle of nowhere," as Irwin described it -- he took up an Abstract Expressionist style of painting. As the dominant language of the American avant-garde at the time, gestural abstraction sought to convey emotion as directly as possible. Irwin's untitled painting of 1960-61 explores the language of action painting with emotionally charged brushwork that cuts across the canvas in strident horizontal and vertical strokes. Layered upon the canvas so that the strokes gravitate toward the composition's center and create compressed depth, Irwin's painterly style demonstrates a subtle command of the relation between space and tactile sensation, akin to Willem de Kooning. The palette, rich in bright yellows and vivid greens, suggests California's effulgent light. The radiant light, together with the dominant intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, would later resurface in Irwin's work, particularly his recent Light and Space installations.

Irwin further distilled form in his paintings, and for several months he ceased painting altogether before returning to a compositional format based solely on taut lines on monochromatic canvases. He created these works, which he referred to as his "Pick-up Sticks" paintings, on an expansive scale, enveloping the viewer in an indeterminate space in which Irwin marked out slender horizontal lines with a palette knife. Although the horizontal line might evoke the viewer's relationship to a horizon, as Irwin described, there was "no pictorial space in any overt way" in these radically austere compositions, so that "your eye could not really ever read the two lines simultaneously, nor even get involved with the kind of compositional thing" (R. Irwin, quoted in Robert Irwin, Los Angeles, 1993 p. 56). At first Irwin worked with four lines then gradually pared down his composition to two lines, as in the present canvas, Untitled (1963-64), an excellent example rendered in an incandescent shade of pale orange. This painting once belonged to Sterling Holloway, a well-known character actor who provided the voice for many of Disney's famous animated characters, and was also an astute collector of West Coast art of the 1960s.

Seeking to have the viewer enter the work, Irwin shifted the focus of his painting to how the work and viewer relate, rather than simply how the figure and ground interact. The viewer's physical experience of paintings such as Untitled (1963-1964) was central to Irwin, so much so that he would not allow paintings to be reproduced in photographs, insisting that their physical existence, their "essential truth," could not be conveyed in photographic terms, as he described in an article published in Artforum in 1965 (R. Irwin, quoted in Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries, San Diego, 2008, p. 147).

"From about 1960 to 1970," Irwin explained, "in an almost reclusive and 'deadly serious' activity, I used my paintings as a step-by-step process, each new series of works acting in direct response to those questions raised by the previous series. I first questioned the mark (the image) as meaning and then even as focus; I then questioned the frame as containment, the edge as the beginning and end of what I see. In this way I slowly dismantled the act of painting to consider the possibility that nothing ever really transcends its immediate environment" (ibid., 149).

After working through this progressively reductive approach to both painting and sculpture in the s1960s, Irwin abandoned working in the studio altogether by the decade's end. He instead explored site-specific installations, in which he continued to probe the issues of perception that he had dealt with in his paintings, but turned his focus to the space around the viewer. These two rare paintings are milestones in his career, exemplifying his command of abstract painting and rejection of the distinctions between touch and sight. The recent retrospective of Irwin's career, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego earlier this year, included works from both these series, demonstrating the vital role they played in Irwin's unfolding development.