Albert Irvin : Fidelio

26 Jul-1 Sep 2012

Overview

On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, Gimpel Fils are holding an exhibition of Albert Irvin's paintings. Irvin has chosen 'Fidelio' as the title, for a number of reasons. There is his fidelity to abstraction, a consistent abstraction in which, over the decades, the artist has been careful to eschew figuration in any form. A S Byatt observed in a text on the artist, 'It is art about experiencing the world', adding, about the paintings' titles 'They are both arbitrary and not, a kind of notation of his life, street-names of London where his studio is... which have a resonance of their own'. Irvin has often referred to the grounding of his practice in the material circumstances of his own life. In an interview given in Dublin, Irvin said : "I don't want to depict or describe appearances - I want to make a kind of painting that is about the world rather than of it."