Robert Irwin (1928–2023) RIP
As many of you will have by now heard, the artist Robert Irwin, my dear longtime friend (coming on almost fifty years now) and in many ways my originary subject (the principal, for starters, of my very first book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, from back in 1980, with a second edition in 2007) died peacefully last Wednesday, at age 95, his wife Adele at his side, following a short illness. I’d visited with him myself the week before at his hospital bedside in La Jolla, where he drifted in and out of copresence, though at moments he grew piercingly, almost achingly himself.
The wonder is still there
“I wasn’t going to accept this degree except it occurred to me that unless I did I wasn’t going to be able to say that."
[Irwin] paused, waiting as the mild laughter eddied. “All I want to say,” he continued, “is that the wonder is still there.” Whereupon he simply walked away.
See ⮂ Also
Robert Irwin’s massive study in light and shade. Alan Jacobs & Robert Irwin (An article)
⭐ Robert Irwin, Artist of Fleeting Light and Space, Is Dead at 95 Jori Finkel & Robert Irwin (An article)
⭐ Interventions Edward Krasiński The idea of an “intervention” within an existing context is very similar to the work that Robert Irwin tends to do.
Richard Serra, Who Recast Sculpture on a Massive Scale, Dies at 85 Roberta Smith Mr. Serra’s most celebrated works had some of the scale of ancient temples or sacred sites and the inscrutability of landmarks like Stonehenge. But if these massive forms had a mystical effect, it came not from religious belief but from the distortions of space created by their leaning, curving or circling walls and the frankness of their materials.
This was something new in sculpture; a flowing, circling geometry that had to be moved through and around to be fully experienced. Mr. Serra said his work required a lot of “walking and looking,” or “peripatetic perception.” It was, he said, “viewer centered”: Its meanings were to be arrived at by individual exploration and reflection.