The Brooklyn Rail

Eight early works of Robert Irwin’s, ranging from 1962 to 1971, installed straightforwardly and exquisitely in Pace’s Los Angeles gallery, is just about as good as it gets. I can’t think of the early work of another artist from that time period who could embody such material range and atmospheric potential while maintaining the consistency, even strictness, of its focus. In the March 2025 issue of the Brooklyn Rail, I wrote about an equally well-done Bruce Nauman exhibition at Marian Goodman’s Hollywood space that brought together a concentration of his early work made in Pasadena starting in 1968. In many ways, their approaches couldn’t be more different: Nauman bouncing around his studio making things happen; Irwin clearly not doing that, but seeing, looking, and carefully examining. In the Pace exhibition, Irwin’s early work emerges as an even bigger influence than I had previously imagined.

Maybe Nauman’s slightly later arrival spared him certain things: the myth-creation of the Ferus Gallery’s so-called Cool School of which Irwin was a crucial member and, more critically, an emergence just enough after the seeming de-throning of painting since, well, pick your starting date. I find it fascinating to consider that the earliest painting in Pace’s exhibition—Jake Leg—is from 1962. It makes sense to examine its minimalist yet painterly-ish structure and surface in the company of a contemporaneous painting like Ed Ruscha’s Actual Size: it’s from the same year and nearly the same dimensions, divided not unlike a Rothko painting with the top half emblazoned with “SPAM” and the bottom half depicting the product “actual size,” as if streaking across the picture like a rocket. It’s not wrong to think of the Ruscha as classic Pop Art, but standing in front of the surprising “pop” of Irwin’s painting—its peachy-beige surface activated by a few mint-green, thin horizontal lines in and/or on it—it asserts that what these two artists shared in approach and temperament is far more important than what made them different. (I think this is true about most of the first Ferus artists; even Ed Kienholz’s and Irwin’s early works have more in common with each other than they do with, for example, what was driving art in New York at that time.)

The inclusion of two untitled paintings from 1964–66, known as Irwin’s “dot paintings,” set across from each other in the expanse of the gallery’s largest room, demonstrates how quick he was to establish a resolute dematerialization even on canvas, still just painting. Produced, it has been revealed, with the use of the back side of a rubber floor mat, stamped rather than traditionally painted, they exist in dramatic contradistinction to the first comic-book paintings of Roy Lichtenstein, especially those with Ben-Day dot patterns reproduced by the stamping of an altered dog brush. In New York, tangibility was still everything. The array of the regular-yet-subtle dot patterns in Irwin’s two paintings activates the stability of their form to destabilize not only the canvas but also the vision of anyone who looks at them anywhere from across the room to standing right in front of them. (Seurat’s labor-driven paintings do come up here.) To stand between them is to be surrounded by the stuff that Irwin was about to zoom in on even more.

The speed at which Irwin got to where he wanted to go remains impressive. 1967 is the year of his well-known “Disc” works, and two are included here: Untitled (1967) and Untitled (c. 1967–69). The bearing of these works on his trajectory as well as a great deal of subsequent artmaking is well-documented. Seeing them in 2025, pristinely installed and in dialogue with Irwin’s earlier paintings, provoked a couple of new ideas, at least for me. First, of course, they confirm Irwin’s crucial role in balancing the material range, atmospheric potential, and consistent focus I mentioned at the beginning, a trifecta of accomplishments that would be played out not only in his future activities but also in the work of all of the Light and Space artists. (The latest work in the exhibition—Untitled (1970–71)—a twelve-foot-tall clear acrylic thin column, stakes his claim with its capacity for bending light and space and maybe even spacetime.)

Then, bringing me back to my fixation on the simultaneity of physicality and effervescence that Irwin’s work had even in 1962, I found myself especially mindful of the actual materials of these two “Disc” works. Both sprayed (painted) with lacquer, the earlier disc is aluminum, the latter acrylic plastic (like the 1970–71 column), bridging the gap between everything in Southern California from the aerospace, hot rod, and surfing industries to the junkyards and movie sets, to the artificiality of nature and the nature of artificiality. Irwin’s work is a testament to how impactful all these things have been on what we still call reality.