Set to open in July 2016, the Irwin Project will be the Chinati Foundation’s largest acquisition in over 10 years. The opening will coincide with a major anniversary event for the Foundation.
INTERSECTING INTERESTS Artist Robert Irwin’s reconstruction of a hospital at the former Fort D.A. Russell in Marfa dismisses disciplinary boundaries between art, architecture, life, and culture. by Jen Wong
3/4 2016
PHOTO BY JESSICA LUTZ
76 Texas Architect
In 1971, the Los Angeles-based artist Robert Irwin embarked on a solitary driving tour of the country’s perimeter. A year earlier, he had completed an installation at the Museum of Modern Art that — while unnoted by the art world — had led to an important personal breakthrough, leading him to leave his studio for good and embark on a new phase of a career in which he has routinely questioned and shed the inessential. The MOMA installation transformed a small, squat room through three site-specific interventions indicated by the title of the work: ”Fractured Light” — “Partial Scrim Ceiling” — “Eye Level Wire." For the first time, “instead of overlaying my ideas onto that space, that space overlaid itself on me.” At a rest stop in West Texas — seemingly in the middle of nowhere — Irwin sat with his customary Coke in hand, when by chance his friend Donald Judd walked by. Judd, then based in New York, was contemplating the creation of a new form of museum, one that would house installations in a permanent space intended for that