Robert Irwin Excursus: Homage to the Square3

For this new installation at Dia:Beacon, the artist redesigned Excursus to engage with the museum’s architectural and lighting specificities, a technique he has articulated as “site-conditioned,” in which “the sculptural response draws all its cues (reasons for being) from its surroundings.”

Realized almost thirty years later, Excursus: Homage to the Square3 furthered Irwin’s exploration of scrim-defined installations and marked his philosophical ambi- tion to create a work that is nonhierarchical in form, encouraging a mobile style of viewership. “The thing is not frontal,” he has remarked, “not linear, not sequential, there’s no beginning, middle or end. You could, essentially, enter anywhere.”