Robert Irwin has been one of the pivotal artists in American Art for more than 46 years both as a practitioner, a theoretician, and a teacher. Irwin began his career as an abstract expressionist; however, by the late 1960s he had moved away from painting to become one of the creators of the art of light and space, using ephemeral materials such as scrim, lighting and orientation to alter and heighten the viewers' perception of the space in which they encountered his work. Since the early 80s Irwin has won an international reputation for his "site-generated" works in public spaces, which often make intimate use of site conditions, architecture, natural elements, plantings and topographic features.

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A pivotal influence in contemporary art, Robert Irwin's work investigates perception and phenomenological experience through sculptural and installation works that engage directly with a location's physical conditions. In the late 1960s, Irwin's early pieces helped to define the aesthetics of the west coast Light and Space movement. In 1970, Irwin abandoned his studio-based art and stripped away all of his conceptions about art-making, until only those two criteria truly did remain: light and space. By the 1980s, he had evolved guidelines for how a site-based art could proceed, and, in a seminal 1986 statement, laid out approaches for "site dominant," "site adjusted," "site specific" or "site conditioned" art--terms that are still essential today. "Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries" spans five decades of the artist's work. Produced to accompany the largest exhibition of Irwin's work since 1993, it includes five of his most recent installation works, four of which were created specifically for MCASD--and features a video documentary of the exhibition installation, plus five essays from the artist's distinguished theoretical output.