ALBERT IRVIN: EARLY WORK FROM THE 60’S
NINO MIER GALLERY is pleased to announce Early Work from the '60s, a solo exhibition by Albert Irvin.
October 24 – December 20, 2025
Albert Irvin was a thoroughly urban painter. Throughout his life, he remained inseparable from his beloved London. Until he died in 2015, he tirelessly walked the streets and rode public transport to stay connected to the city’s pulse. This enduring love affair profoundly shaped his career. Many of his works were titled after London streets and locations, and he approached the canvas with the same logic as he approached the city: size and borders were constraints, like walls and roadblocks, that directed movement. He often drew parallels between the sweep of his brush across a canvas and the way he wandered, or even waltzed, through life.
For Irvin, paint substance and brush movement were the means to capture daily experience in its fullest sense. He described the painted surface, the “active area”, as a human context, an analogue for living, moving, and loving in the world. Painting, to him, was a way of channeling life’s force, of expressing the richness of being human with all its emotions. Above all, paintings should convey feeling. For Irvin, art had to communicate life’s astonishing energy, and nothing mattered more than using his work to embody a deeply compassionate humanity.
This conviction, that paintings are vessels for emotion, guided his transition from figurative to abstract art. In 1956, Irvin encountered the Modern Art in the United States exhibition at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain). “It was like a bomb going off”, he later recalled. Seeing works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman convinced him that the true challenge of his generation was to paint truths about reality without depicting objects, to create a vision of the world without relying on imitation. Dispensing with representation made room for authentic emotion to become central. The bold energy and confidence of the American Abstract Expressionists gave Irvin the final push to abandon figurative scenes of working-class life and embrace abstraction: “It’s possible to say what it felt like to be a human being without having to paint noses and feet.”
Music was another crucial influence on Irvin’s practice. He wanted his paintings, like music, to embody a pure and direct experience. Just as music needs no explanation, his art should resonate immediately. “The abstract can take a line, isolate it, or repeat it differently to reveal its strength, like Beethoven with just a few notes in his Fifth Symphony,” he said, “As with the opening bars of a symphony, you don’t ask yourself, ‘What’s that supposed to be?’ It just is.” Throughout his career, Irvin sought to achieve this same immediacy in his paintings.