Opening Reception: Saturday, September 17, 2011

L&M Arts, Los Angeles is honored to present Way Out West, an exhibition of new fluorescent light tube sculptures by California based artist Robert Irwin. This will be the artist’s first commercial gallery show of new work in Los Angeles in over 40 years.

In this exhibition, Robert Irwin, a pioneering artist of the “Light and Space” movement, continues his ongoing interest in the perceptual qualities of light, experimenting with rhythm, texture, densities, temperature and tonal relationships. Irwin wraps the fluorescent tubes in as many as 13 gels to achieve a range of hues, and vertically mounts the lights in groups. The sculptures are organized in heights of four, six and eight feet ranging from three to twenty-seven fixtures on the wall.

These works are meant to exist in several different states, including the off position, dramatically altering the compositions, mood and atmosphere of the surrounding environment. In each state, chromatic relationships change, temperatures go from warm to cool and back again, and the quality of light in the room changes. For this exhibition, the work will be shown in both daylight and artificial light, with both environments playing a crucial role, creating a dialogue with the light that radiates from within the work. Light tubes reflect upon each other, and the spaces between them allow the adjacent colors to refract, producing a vast range of hues. The artist will determine the state that each sculpture shall remain in for the duration of the exhibition.

Robert Irwin’s work can currently be viewed at the Getty Center for Los Angeles, the Pomona College Museum of Art as part of the “It Happened at Pomona” exhibition and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in the Phenomenal: California Light, Space Surface exhibition.

Robert Irwin (b. 1928, Long Beach, California) became the first artist to receive the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1984, a five-year fellowship, which lasted until 1989. Irwin has conceived of fifty-five site projects since 1975, ranging from the architectural and grounds design of Dia: Beacon Center for the Arts (completed in 2003) to the Central Gardens for the Getty Center for Los Angeles, California (completed in 2005). His work has been featured in more than sixty solo exhibitions and is held in more than thirty public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.