Robert Irwin — a longtime San Diego artist associated with the Light and Space movement of the 1960s who early on stopped making paintings in favor of creating ephemeral and sometimes intangible art environments — died Wednesday at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. He was 95. Within the contemporary art world, Irwin's work on human attention and perception — he called it, with a nod to scientific research, an 'inquiry' into perception — was highly influential.
in 1969 and a career retrospective in 2007. is honored to have the largest holdings of Irwin’s artwork, including his early abstract canvases, drawings and public art proposals, and several installations. More than one dozen of his works are on long term view at the expanded La Jolla site. 'Indeed, in September 2021, just prior to the museum’s reopening, Bob oversaw the placement of 'Spanish Fan' , a radiant glass sculpture in our outdoor sculpture garden.
, in a 2007 interview: 'The pure subject of art is human perception. Once you take that position, it changes all the rules of the game for what you do and how you do it.' Robert Walter Irwin was born Sept. 12, 1928, in Long Beach, to Overton and Goldie Irwin. His father ran a contracting business in Los Angeles that thrived in the 1920s but failed during the Depression, when Robert Irwin was growing up. His father later worked for the local department of water and power.