Plimsoll

Irvin was one of an extraordinary generation of British painters, including Gillian Ayres, John Hoyland and Bridget Riley, who were profoundly influenced by the exhibition of American painting organised by the Tate in 1956. Irvin recalls the experience of seeing the Abstract Expressionist pictures as ‘like a bomb going off’. He became convinced that abstract art could stand in meaningful ‘relation to your own perception, you could move across a canvas in a way that you move through the spaces of the world… notions of space like proximity and distance could be revealed by moving across a canvas with a brush’. Furthermore, he described this move into abstraction as connected to the feeling that it could have an immediate impact, that there was ‘no need for interpretation, like music’, and that you ‘could reveal something of the human condition’ in paintings which did not have ‘humans in them’.

The exhibition explored Irvin’s relationship with the birth of abstraction in Britain from the late 1950’s onwards, and included works drawn from 1960 (Slow Black Night) to 2012 (Memory II). Although the artist is noted for his bright, dazzling paintings, the colour blue was common to the exhibited works. Over the past decades these 'blue paintings' have appeared irregularly but repeatedly in his output. These lesser-known blue and blue-green paintings, warmed by other colours, are an essential part of Irvin’s artistic practice. They are studies in the metaphysical quality of painting and one of the key drivers in Irvin’s work.

www.albert-irvin.com

In loving memory.
Alvert Irvin (1922-2015).