The evolution of Robert Irwin's art...

In Irwin's book, "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees", you see how his thought process took him from exploring 2d work into using light and space as his key elements...


This biography from the Archives of AskART:
Devoting most of his career to probing the ambiguity of space and light through the use of scrim, the semi-transparent fabric often used in set design, Robert Irwin began his career in California.

He was based in San Diego, and his early abstract canvases, straight lines or dots of color, placed to exercise the viewer's perceptions of space, seemed an attempt to bring inside the white light of Southern California. Then he began adding fluorescent fixtures to the middle of his installations, and these circular discs addressed his frustration with conventional painting which seemed confined within rectangles.