A flowering of activity for Robert Irwin, 81 by Leah Ollman (Printed April 11th, 2010 Los Angles Times)
No one seems more tickled than Robert Irwin himself by where the artist, at 81, has landed. “It’s fairly humorous,” he says with a smile. Whatever the unsavory circumstances, “I come up smelling like a rose. I like what I’m doing.”
In his customary jeans and baseball cap, he sits among his newly installed work at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, not exactly smug but clearly satisfied. This is his first commercial gallery show in California in 30 years, the result of several significant shifts in his working process. He resisted every one of them, but each ended up delivering unexpected opportunities. They’ve left him chuckling — surprised and grateful.
His new fluorescent tube sculptures relate to other work he’s made over the decades, but they sprang most directly out of an extensive exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s two newly built downtown locations in 2007-08. Director Hugh Davies organized the show, which traced Irwin’s evolution from Abstract Expressionist painter to creator of room-sized environments defined by light, space and color.
The exhibition turned out to be a catalyst for Irwin. “For a lot of artists, having a retrospective kind of freezes them,” Davies says. “With Bob it had the opposite effect. It really energized him.”
