Robert Irwin

American, b. 1928

Credited with making works of art that don’t announce themselves as such, Robert Irwin is perhaps best known for the Getty Gardens in Los Angeles, an ever-changing, site-specific installation that explores the interplay between light, flora, and water. Irwin, an innovator in the Light and Space movement, began his career as a painter and turned to installation as a means of disposing with medium and object altogether. Irwin’s installations sometimes result from the elimination of forms from a space, such as his removal of window panes at San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art to alter the experience of being in the gallery.