On loan from the Foundation is Robert Irwin’s 2011 light sculpture Lucky You for Oklahoma Contemporary‘s forthcoming inaugural exhibition at their new downtown location.
Light & Space artist Robert Irwin is more interested in creating atmospheres than images. A former Abstract Expressionist painter, he began incorporating fluorescent tubes into his installations in 1970. Here, the thirteen evenly-spaced tubes emit six different colors, with four on/off, user-controlled configurations. The colored filters are named after flora, including jade, violet, orange and avocado, abstracting the artist’s native San Diego terrain into a light experience. Irwin’s color combinations encourage viewers to see a visual phenomenon rather than an object, evidenced by the artist’s preferred medium description: “light, shadow and reflection.” For Irwin, each viewer’s unique perception of Lucky You is a truth fundamental to the artwork’s meaning.
Bright Golden Haze, the inaugural exhibition at Oklahoma Contemporary’s new downtown campus, is an insightful group exhibition will explore the ways in which artists use light to create place, both geographic and conceptual, inspired by both the uniquely influential quality of light and space in the state and the new building itself. The exhibition, which takes its title from the first line in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s iconic musical Oklahoma!, will present a thematic grouping of new, recent and site-specific works.