Robert Irwin is a master of emptiness who sculpts with light in ways making everything mysterious and cosmic. He is California’s most radical light-and-space artist who once exhibited an empty gallery in Venice as a work of art. But that is just one side of Irwin. If you walk around this translucent, smokey-gray acrylic objet du jour, you gain an appreciation for an uncompromising perfectionist who spent a year attempting to create a perfect line on a flat canvas. More importantly, you began to understand that because of its subtle nature, in-person viewing is essential as this sculpture only “becomes fully present when you are standing in the physical space, experiencing it over an extended period of time.” (Evelyn Hankins, quoted in Roger Catlin, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 April 2016)

Irwin’s iconic acrylic columns were first created in 1969. It was a pivotal time just before he closed his studio and developed a kind of installation art devoted entirely to the phenomenology of perception. Large-scale and freestanding, the works proposed the possibility of artwork that is all but indistinguishable from the surrounding space. As Irwin explained, “I began to try and figure out a way to make a non-object art…I was not interested in them (the columns) as an object and as you moved around them, they would not be there at all. At another point, they would just be a black line in the air or if you move further would suddenly become a silver line. So, they came and went and manifested themselves in the space.” (Robert Irwin: “The Beauty of Questions”, film by Leonard Feinstein, 1997)

Untitled, 2016 is a return to that early dialogue on the phenomenology of perception. Assembled the year of Irwin’s historical survey of work from 1958 to 1970 at The Hirshhorn Museum, it requires direct participation. Narrow strips of green paint added at the conjunction of the panels recall Barnett Newman, an artist who knew something about ‘emptiness.’ The ‘zip’ here simultaneously divides and unifies a composition, Irwin’s one concession to opacity that effectively adds to its streamlined gravitas and astonishing visual effects without betraying its evanescent nature. As Irwin observed, “To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects. What we are really dealing with is the state of our consciousness, and the shape of our perception.” (Robert Irwin, “The State of the Real, Part 1,” conversation with Jan Butterfield, Arts, June 1972, pg. 48).