Robert Irwin & Philipp Scholz Rittermann
The Real Deal, 2013
7611 Fay Avenue
In June of 2013, Robert Irwin’s site-specific installation Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue III was installed at 6 Burlington Gardens in London and subsequently photographed by Philipp Scholz Rittermann. Irwin’s installation, documented here, occupied the entire ground floor space of the gallery. Three highly reflective black and primary colored panels suspended from the ceiling mirrored three identical panels playing with light, reflection, movement, and shadow.
The dynamism of Irwin's piece captured by Rittermann focuses on the interplay between the physical object and the surrounding environment. The viewer is confounded by perception versus reality. Natural and artificial light mix and reflect off of the glossy panels creating an environment which defies logic.
Robert Irwin is an American artist focusing on the exploration and augmentation of perception. He was born in 1928 in Long Beach, California. He attended Otis Art Institute, Jepson Art Institute, and Chouinard Art Institute, and later taught at Chouinard. Irwin began his career as a painter in the 1950s and was a pioneer of the Light and Space movement in the 1960s. Irwin has sought to reinvent perception as a core factor of his work that plays with the physical sense of time and space. He uses location and architectural elements to create site-specific installations.
He received the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1984. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the San Francisco Art Institute and the Otis College of Art and Design. Irwin's work is held in many public collections worldwide including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Irwin lives and works in San Diego.
Philipp Scholz Rittermann’s photographs reveal hidden layers of the world at large. His subject matter ranges from moody European scenes at night, to overwhelming industrial panoramas in China, to classically beautiful landscapes in the Americas. Born and raised in Peru in 1955, he moved to Germany in 1969, where he taught photography, and co-founded Galerie Novum in Hannover. In 1981, he emigrated to the USA, eventually settling in California. Scholz Rittermann’s work embodies a subtle drama, poeticism, and often monumental quality, while seeking to expand the spatial and temporal limits of our perception. His practice has shifted away from depicting the world as it appears, towards creating images which incorporate multiple time-states. The question underlying this work explores what the world might look like if the human gaze were capable of straddling day/night, summer/winter, presence/absence.
Scholz Rittermann’s photographs are held in more than 100 public, private, and corporate collections, including MoMA, New York and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Europe and the Americas, including the Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego, and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Scholz Rittermann has been teaching photography in the United States and abroad for four decades. He lives and works in San Diego, California.
24' x 61' 2"
Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann