Robert Irwin (artist)

Robert W. Irwin
Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977) – (2013)
Born	(1928-09-12)September 12, 1928 Long Beach, California, U.S.
Died	October 25, 2023(2023-10-25) (aged 95) La Jolla, California, U.S.
Known for	Painting, installation art, site-specific art
Movement	Light and Space
Elected	National Academy of Design (2012)

Robert Walter Irwin (September 12, 1928 – October 25, 2023) was an American installation artist who explored perception and the conditional in art, often through site-specific, architectural interventions that alter the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space.

Irwin began his career as a painter in the 1950s, but in the 1960s shifted to installation work, becoming a pioneer whose work helped to define the aesthetics and conceptual issues of the West Coast Light and Space movement. His early works often employed light and veils of scrim to transform gallery and museum spaces, but from 1975 until his death, he also incorporated landscape projects into his practice. Irwin conceived over fifty-five site-specific projects, at institutions including the Getty Center (1992–98), Dia:Beacon (1999–2003), and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (2001–16). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted the first retrospective of his work in 1993; in 2008, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented another, spanning fifty years of his career. Irwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, a MacArthur Fellowship in March 1984,^[1] and was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007. He lived and worked in San Diego, California.