Traces the life and career of the California artist, who currently works with pure light and the subtle modulation of empty space

This book explores four decades of Robert Irwin's outdoor environment projects through his drawings and architectural models. Over the course of a storied career, Robert Irwin has come to regard art as site determined, or something that works in and responds to its surroundings. This book opens with his projects on college campuses between 1975 and 1982. These are followed by Irwin's major, yet never realized, commission for the Miami International Airport, where he proposed to transform the structure, parking lots, and roadways into a sequence of aesthetic and practical spaces that engaged directly with the South Florida environment. It then turns to one of Irwin's most celebrated works, the Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Finally, the book takes readers to the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and one of Irwin's most ambitious works to date--a monumental artwork that brilliantly connects viewers to the land and sky. Throughout this collection of drawings, models, and photographs of magnificent, groundbreaking projects, readers will come to see Irwin as a visionary artist and a brilliant draftsman.

"Robert Irwin, perhaps the most influential of the California artists, moved from his beginnings in abstract expressionism through successive shifts in style and sensibility, into a new aesthetic territory altogether, one where philosophical concepts of perception and the world interact. Weschler has charted the journey with exceptional clarity and cogency. He has also, in the process, provided what seems to me the best running history of postwar West Coast art that I have yet seen."—Calvin Tomkins

A beautifully illustrated, accessible volume about one of the Getty Center’s best-loved sites. Among the most beloved sites at the Getty Center, the Central Garden has aroused intense interest from the moment artist Robert Irwin was awarded the commission. First published in 2002, Robert Irwin Getty Garden is comprised of a series of discussions between noted author Lawrence Weschler and Irwin, providing a lively account of what Irwin has playfully termed “a sculpture in the form of a garden aspiring to be art.” The text revolves around four garden walks: extended conversations in which the artist explains the critical choices he made—from plant materials to steel—in the creation of a living work of art that has helped to redefine what a modern garden can and should be. This updated edition features new photography of the Central Garden in a smaller, more accessible format.

A comprehensive study of one of the most significant and prolific American postwar artists. Frequently associated with California Light and Space Art, Robert Irwin (b. 1928) began as an abstract painter in the 1950s. Since that time, he has worked in architectural and outdoor interventions, developing and expanding what he terms a "conditional" art practice. He employs a wide range of media, such as scrim veils, chain link fencing, Cor-ten walls, flowering plants, palm trees, fluorescent light bulbs, and more. Ultimately, Irwin's medium is none of these specific materials, but rather perception itself - its forms, limits, and possibilities for expansion and change. In the artist's own words, the aim of his work is to change "the whole visual structure of how you look at the world." This handsome, richly illustrated volume is the first book devoted to an in-depth investigation of the entirety of Irwin's career, tracing the development of Irwin's ambitions from his earliest canvases to his most recent light installations. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, including the artist's library and his published and unpublished writings, Matthew Simms surveys the full scope of Irwin's creative output, the reception of his work, and its multiple aesthetic and historical contexts. In the resulting thorough yet accessible account, essential for scholars of post-war American art, conditional art emerges as a continual source of renewed aesthetic perception.

This publication is devoted to the titular work by the legendary San Diego-based light and space artist Irwin, the most recent addition to the Chinati Foundation's permanent collection, inaugurated in July 2016 after 17 years of planning.

"Devoted to the writings of this seminal post-war American artist. Fully half of these writings, which span a period from the mid-1960s through the 1990s, are published here for the very first time"--Dust jacket.