ROBERT IRWIN IN LOS ANGELES
Pace is pleased to present Robert Irwin in Los Angeles, an exhibition of work produced by Robert Irwin between 1960 and 1971, at its Los Angeles gallery, marking the first exhibition of Irwin’s work mounted by Pace since the artist’s death in 2023 and his first posthumous presentation in California.
April 5 – June 7, 2025
Robert Irwin in Los Angeles is presented on the occasion of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, during which the gallery is mounting exhibitions of work by major 20th century artists—with whom it has maintained decades-long relationships—at its spaces around the world.
A foundational figure in the California Light and Space movement, Irwin was a serial innovator across painting, sculpture, and installation over the course of nearly seven decades, expanding the contours of the canon and continually pushing the limits of what art can be. Through his influential and experimental practice—marked by both scientific and philosophical rigor—he proposed a new kind of art making, which revolved around phenomenology and the subjectivity of the viewer. Through his profound artistic inventions, which used light and space as primary materials, Irwin cultivated a reputation as a visionary figure, defining the vanguard of what is known today as experiential art.
The gallery’s upcoming presentation in Los Angeles brings together historically significant paintings and sculptures created by Irwin in the 1960s and 1970s—the years that would come to define the Light and Space movement. Among the works on view are major paintings from Irwin’s early Line and Dot series of the mid-1960s, in which he pushed the medium to new conceptual territories. These works are in dialogue with his celebrated Discs of the late 1960s, which further obscured the boundaries between the physical and the sensory.
The exhibition also includes a rare, twelve-foot-tall acrylic column that appears like a ripple in space—this sculpture is among the last physical objects that Irwin made before turning toward an entirely ephemeral and installation-based practice in the 1970s.