Robert Irwin

Judd Foundation presents Robert Irwin, an exhibition of three works at 101 Spring Street in New York. The exhibition marks the first posthumous presentation of Robert Irwin’s work in the United States and extends inquiries into visual perception made by the artist in the same space more than fifty years ago.

Sculpture/Configuration 2T 3L (2018), a column of layered acrylic units, features a material and form first utilized by Irwin in the late 1960s. Measuring nearly ten feet in height and comprised of gray and green acrylic sheets, the work is installed in the same location as one of Irwin’s single twelve-foot columns exhibited in the space in 1971. The columns engage, as writer Lawrence Weschler summarizes, “the incidental, the transitory, the peripheral—that aspect of our experience that is both there and not there, the object and the not object of our sensations, perceived but seldom attended to.”

The sculptures AS GOOD AS IT GETS (2023) and “C and C” (Complex/Coherent) (2021) define three ephemeral elements of perception Irwin engaged throughout his practice: shadow, reflection, and color. Part of Irwin’s unlights, a series first shown in New York in 2020, these works include fluorescent tubes and fixtures installed directly on the walls of the space interspersed with translucent color gels. These compositions, in colors ranging from blue, green, and gray to red, purple, and brown, emit no light themselves, yet create interactions with natural light and reflections on the glass and aluminum.

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