Given Irwin's central role in the redesign of Dia Beacon, this display celebrates his foundational vision for the museum and offers the rare opportunity to appreciate the interconnections between the artistic and architectural aspects of his work.
This large-scale work places his work in dialogue with concurrent presentations of works by Larry Bell, Melvin Edwards, and Charles Gaines-all of whom have critically contributed to Minimal, P ostminimal, and C onceptual art on the West Coast. First realized as a commission in 1972 for Harvard University’s Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts (and then titled Full Room Skylight – Scrim V – Fogg Museum, Harvard ), the work is also one of the artist’s earliest uses of scrim-a gauzy material he discovered in 1970 - to create luminescent volumes of light in relationship to existing architecture. Full Room Skylight – Scrim V – Dia Beacon exemplifies what the artist describes as his site-conditioned mode of working. A progenitor of the late 1960s California-based Light and Space movement, Robert Irwin began his career as an abstract painter but quickly turned to more ephemeral installations that respond t o their surrounding environments.
