Rose Korber Art

Artist's Statement:

Instantly recognisable, Albert Irvin’s works feature gestural brushstrokes that sweep across richly patterned backgrounds. Deceptively simple’, his works are, in fact, skilfully balanced, yet dynamic compositions, exploring the relationship between form and colour.

Irvin is one of the generation of British painters - including Gillian Ayres, John Hoyland and Basil Beattie - whose work has both continued and expanded the legacy of Abstract Expresssionism. He has exhibited extensively, and his works are in the Tate Gallery as well as in many other public and private collections throughout the UK and other parts of the world.

Irvin’s vibrant paintings and original prints are composed of abstract forms, such as circles, quatrefoils , lines and crosses, and feature bright and often contrasting colours. These pictorial elements and colours characterise a distinctive visual language through which Irvin explores the experience of being in the world.

His work is fuelled by the questions: 'Can I make a painting about human experience without having to depict appearances? Can I paint the human spirit rather than noses and feet? Can I reveal the splendours and agonies of life through space, colour, shape, line, confrontation, rhythm and inflection in the paint?’

As well as having metaphorical significance, his works evoke an immediate emotional response in a similar way to music . Irvin’s works are created through a process of invention and discovery with no foreseen outcome, in sympathy with the way music is composed through improvisation.

Biography:

Irvin lives in London and works at his studio in Stepney Green in the East End. His paintings and prints are informed to an extent by the experience of moving through a busy urban environment. Works are often identified by street or place names like this work, although they are not of a particular place: a street or place name is chosen because its meanings or associations suggest the character of the work.

Irvin was born in London in 1922, and studied at Northampton School of Art, after being evacuated from the capitol at the onset of World War II. He was conscripted in 1941 and served as a navigator in the RAF. After the war, he studied at Goldsmiths College, where he later taught between 1962 and 1983. He had his first solo exhibition in Edinburgh in 1960 .

As a student, his work owed a strong debt to the Impressionists, but, as the 1950’s progressed, he became more influenced by the realist style of the London Kitchen Sink painters, such as Walter Sickert and Jack Smith. From the mid-50’s, however, Irvin’s work changed course again, particularly after he saw the exhibition of the American Abstract Expressionists, 'Modern Art in the United States', at the Tate Gallery in 1956.

In 1959 Irvin painted his first fully abstract painting, and began working on a larger scale and minimising the amount of naturalistic colour. Increasingly, he was to conceive the picture space metaphorically as a terrain with affinities both to London, street maps and to landscape.

In the late 1960s he became more concerned with conveying the process of painting, and started using acrylic paint because it was more fluid and quick drying.

In the late 70s he experimented with greater spatial complexity. His subsequent work has the appearance of being built up as a tapestry of gestural strokes, symbols and cross-hatching in lively, chromatically intense compositions.