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Robert Irwin Richard Gray Visual Artists Series

ABOUT 

  • ABOUT Robert Irwin

    Robert Irwin is a pivotal artist as a practitioner, a theoretician, and a teacher. He began as an abstract expressionist painter, decided to pursue installation art in the 1970s, and has gained a reputation for his site-generated works in public spaces since then. He designed the Central Garden for the Getty Center in Los Angeles and his work has been displayed in museums across the country.

    Profile
  • ABOUT Lawrence Weschler

    Lawrence “Ren” Weschler, Emeritus Artistic Director, joined the staff in January 2006. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine for twenty years, shuttling between political tragedies and cultural comedies, and is the author of over a dozen books, including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder for which he was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award, and Everything that Rises; A Book of Convergences for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2007.

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One of the really crucial issues in a radical history is the idea that one has to confront their own beliefs and their own ideas about what the nature of the world is.       

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Since the 1960s, Robert Irwin has been an influential American artist. Beginning as an abstract expressionist, he progressively honed his vocation, first toward ever-more-minimal painterly gestures, then as one of the founders of the so-called Light and Space movement, and subsequently a long period when his work, often maddeningly temporary, became entirely site-conditioned.

Emerging at the far end, he has been responsible for such epoch-shaping masterpieces as the Central Garden at The Getty Center in Los Angeles and the overall design for Dia Art Foundation’s new Beacon, New York museum. Throughout his career he has attempted to get people to perceive themselves perceiving—arguably, the greatest marvel of all.

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