Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change

Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change, a major exhibition by one of the leading postwar American artists, is the first museum survey devoted to Irwin’s work from the pivotal decade of the 1960s, as well as the first US museum survey outside his native California since 1977. The Hirshhorn is the exhibition’s only venue.

Best known as a pioneer of California Light and Space art, Irwin (American, b. 1928, Long Beach, California; lives and works in San Diego) is also a leading figure in broader movements away from discrete art objects in traditional media and toward an understanding of art as perceptual experience. The exhibition, whose title is drawn from the artist’s writings, consists of two parts. A historical survey chronicles the period from 1958 to 1970, during which Irwin moved from making small-scale abstract paintings to large acrylic discs and columns, before eventually abandoning working in a studio in favor of producing ephemeral installations of modest, unconventional materials, each made in response to the circumstances of a given site. The exhibition culminates in a major new commission in the Hirshhorn’s galleries, where Irwin has created an immersive installation in response to the museum’s distinctive architecture.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color scholarly catalogue, co-published with Prestel, that includes essays by Hirshhorn Curator Evelyn Hankins, organizer of the exhibition; California State University, Long Beach Professor of Art History Matthew Simms; former Museum of Modern Art Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture Jennifer (Licht) Winkworth; and Hirshhorn Director of Collections Emeritus Susan Lake. The catalogue also reprints “Notes toward a Model,” a crucial theoretical text by Irwin originally published in 1977.

*Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1969. Acrylic paint on shaped acrylic, 53 1/4 inches in diameter. Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 1986. © 2016 Robert Irwin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.