Robert Irwin and James Turrell, both from Los Angeles, are among the most recognized and innovative artists to have emerged in the 1960s. While their work is sometimes described in terms of “light and space”, both share a deep interest in human perception. Irwin has worked in many mediums, from painting to gardens. Turrell’s work is characterized by a consistent engagement with pure light. Beginning in the 1960s, both artists challenged fundamental assumptions about the nature of art and experience, for a brief time during that period, they developed an exchange of ideas that influenced one another’s subsequent work, made in diverse and distinct contexts.

Irwin and Turrell began exchanging ideas in Los Angeles in the summer of 1968 as part of the Art & Technology project of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Irwin, then forty years old, was already an established artist. Having begun as a painter, he had recently produced a series of nearly dematerialized discs that bordered on pure phenomena. Turrell, twenty-five, had recently finished his studies in perceptual psychology at Pomona College and had already become known for his first artworks: object-less light projections. They were soon joined by scientist Ed Wortz, who specialized in the study of human perceptual responses in specific conditions—for example, space travel. Their three-way collaboration heightened each artist’s understanding of human perception of visual and other sensory experience.

Giuseppe Panza di Biumo was among the first collectors and champions of Irwin’s and Turrell’s art, and the six site-specific installations he commissioned in 1973 for Villa Panza remain on view today. Those installations—together with a selection of works from the 1960s and new works—comprise this exhibition, the first anywhere to pair these two important artists.In 1973 Panza first travelled to Los Angeles, where he visited Turrell’s Santa Monica studio. Turrell had darkened the interior and allowed light to materialize through a small opening to the outside. That same year, Panza acquired his first work by Irwin: a disc, included in this exhibition. He also acquired some of Turrell’s early projections, including a version of his first work, Afrum, from 1967, also on view here.

Both artists’ work had a profound effect on Panza, as did their interest in philosophy and science, which he shared. He recognized the very radical nature of their work as it functioned outside the traditional confines of painting and sculpture; it required him to think about permanent, site-specific interventions rather than movable objects. One aspect of the work that was of particular interest to Panza was how it literally broke through the boundaries of architecture into nature.

Irwin’s famous rectangular aperture in one of the walls of Villa Panza is directed out to dense green trees of the garden was neither a window nor a picture—as Renaissance painting always aspired to be—but rather a merging of indoors and outdoors. In the same way, Turrell’s second Skyspace, a square aperture in the ceiling, brings the distant sky down to the interior space of our perception. Irwin’s Varese Scrim creates an ambiguous ethereal space exactly parallel to the immediate space where we are walking, while Turrell’s Virga materializes outside light as an interior presence.

The installations made for the Villa also inspired Panza to envision an entirely new kind of exhibition space specifically designed for “Environmental Art,” prefiguring many of the contemporary art museums that have been built since. Panza’s ideas are evident in correspondence with the two artists that is included in this exhibition.

New works by both artists reveal their consistent interests, underscored by many years of practice. Two large new works made specifically for the architecture of the Villa are more immersive. Irwin has created a new installation with scrim in the ground floor Limonaia gallery, which moves from inside to outside through a row of vertical openings and not one, but a more complex series of semi-transparent planes. Viewers are very actively engaged in forming their own perceptions of this space, which rhythmically echoes itself.

Turrell’s large Ganzfeld is also slightly disorienting, immersing us in an indeterminate volume of changing color without up or down, left or right. Turrell refers to it sometimes as our “new landscape,” one without horizon—like outer space, or cyberspace. The sometimes-intense changing colors are “mixed” between an environment and our mind. Such an experience is also aided by new technologies, such as computer-driven LED lights that, though imagined, were not available in the 1960s, when Turrell began thinking about such works.

Color has also played an important role in Irwin’s more recent work—for example, in the monumental garden he made for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2001. Here at Villa Panza, Irwin presents a new work made with fluorescent light and painted metal supports to create a wondrous visual puzzle of vertical lines of color, light, and shadow.

Both artists have extended or refined earlier ideas using new media and materials. Irwin has made a new and larger version of his nearly invisible acrylic columns (invented in 1970) that even more powerfully rearranges our experience of space around it. Turrell has made his materialization of colored light more intimate and more portable in his most recent series of holograms. Considered retrospect, Irwin's and Turrell’s art shares many common concerns while remaining distinct. Each of these two influential artists is able to precisely manipulate many different media, as well as light and space itself, into exceptionally simple forms that have expansive and unpredictable effects on our seeing, often allowing us a glimpse into the complex and beautiful mechanisms of our own perception. As Panza aptly summarized, “It looks very simple, but it’s not”.

Text by Michael Govan, CEO and Director LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art.