Untitled

“How is it that a space could ever come to be considered empty when it is filled with real and tactile events?” Robert Irwin asked in 1977. A pioneering figure in California Light and Space art, Irwin had launched a series of luminous disk paintings one decade prior: Untitled comprises a single, spray-painted, convex plastic disk, cantilevered 12 inches from the wall. Four lights are angled toward the disk to produce a diaphanous array of overlapping shadows. These seem to merge with the painting’s radiant core, blurring the distinction between what is material and what is immaterial. On the one hand, Irwin’s work is elusive and illusory. On the other hand, the artist’s explorations of perceptual phenomena led him to conclude that “all ideas and values have their roots in experience,” which is always, importantly, “conditional.”