The work was commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Trust in honor of James N. Wood, the Trust’s former president and CEO, who passed away in June 2010.
A wedge of black granite weighing 40,000 pounds, Black on White extends from the Entrance Hall of the J. Paul Getty Museum into the courtyard. Like all of Irwin’s work since the 1970s, this piece is site-conditional, organized conceptually and physically by the space in which it is installed. Just as architect Richard Meier considered the Getty rotunda as a lobby that encompasses both the indoors and the outdoors, Irwin’s sculpture literally moves from inside to outside, allowing the building’s glass wall to pass through its sculptural form.
“Black on White is an extraordinarily powerful, enigmatic presence in the Entrance Hall’s rotunda—a dramatic, sleek, black radius, linking the Museum’s indoor and outdoor spaces,” explains David Bomford, acting director of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Artist and teacher Robert Irwin is considered one of the foremost contemporary artists working in America. Born and raised in Southern California, Irwin began his career as a painter, associating with the vibrant Ferus gallery scene of the late 1950s and 1960s. Irwin’s ongoing considerations of the nature of light and space led him to consider his paintings as objects, which eventually led him to produce complex environmental paintings and, in turn, non-object based environments and installations. By the early 1970s he was a leader among the generation of artists to define the “Light and Space” movement, which informed the complex works he continues to produce today. Irwin’s artwork is characterized by unique perceptual qualities that are produced by and respond to the specific conditions that surround each work.
In conceiving Black on White, Irwin considered the rotunda’s light-filled space; as the light changes throughout the day, so does the surface quality of the polished granite. He also took into account the thousands of visitors who pass through the rotunda each day.
“It was a very big challenge to put a piece in that huge, heavily populated lobby and give it a commanding presence,” said Irwin. “I realized it had to be one gesture, and it had to be black, because everything else is white.”
In addition to site-specific installations, Irwin’s work has also included extensive theoretical writing and landscape design. Black on White is the second artwork produced by Irwin for the Getty Center. In 1997, he completed the Central Garden, one of his best-known commissions. The presentation of Black on White coincides with the October 2011 release of the Getty Publications book Notes Toward a Conditional Art, a significant collection of Irwin’s published and unpublished writing on postwar American art.
Black on White is on view at the Getty Center through March 18, 2012.