Albert Irvin
Albert Irvin: Early Work from the '60s
Brussels
October 24 – December 20, 2025
Albert Irvin was a thoroughly urban painter. Throughout his life, he remained inseparable from his beloved London. Until he died in 2015, he tirelessly walked the streets and rode public transport to stay connected to the city’s pulse. This enduring love affair profoundly shaped his career. Many of his works were titled after London streets and locations, and he approached the canvas with the same logic as he approached the city: size and borders were constraints, like walls and roadblocks, that directed movement. He often drew parallels between the sweep of his brush across a canvas and the way he wandered, or even waltzed, through life.
For Irvin, paint substance and brush movement were the means to capture daily experience in its fullest sense. He described the painted surface, the “active area”, as a human context, an analogue for living, moving, and loving in the world. Painting, to him, was a way of channeling life’s force, of expressing the richness of being human with all its emotions. Above all, paintings should convey feeling. For Irvin, art had to communicate life’s astonishing energy, and nothing mattered more than using his work to embody a deeply compassionate humanity.
This conviction, that paintings are vessels for emotion, guided his transition from figurative to abstract art. In 1956, Irvin encountered the Modern Art in the United States exhibition at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain). “It was like a bomb going off”, he later recalled. Seeing works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman convinced him that the true challenge of his generation was to paint truths about reality without depicting objects, to create a vision of the world without relying on imitation. Dispensing with representation made room for authentic emotion to become central. The bold energy and confidence of the American Abstract Expressionists gave Irvin the final push to abandon figurative scenes of working-class life and embrace abstraction: “It’s possible to say what it felt like to be a human being without having to paint noses and feet.”
Music was another crucial influence on Irvin’s practice. He wanted his paintings, like music, to embody a pure and direct experience. Just as music needs no explanation, his art should resonate immediately. “The abstract can take a line, isolate it, or repeat it differently to reveal its strength, like Beethoven with just a few notes in his Fifth Symphony,” he said, “As with the opening bars of a symphony, you don’t ask yourself, ‘What’s that supposed to be?’ It just is.” Throughout his career, Irvin sought to achieve this same immediacy in his paintings.
The works in Early Work from the '60s capture a decisive moment in Irvin’s career, when he had fully immersed himself in abstraction but was still working with oil paint. He switched permanently to acrylics in 1974, while teaching at Goldsmiths, yet the works on view here are predominantly in oil. Nino Mier Gallery is delighted to present these rarely seen works from such a pivotal period. In works like Place, 1965 and Nexus, 1966, the lingering memories of Irvin’s service as a navigator in the Royal Air Force during World War II are still present. The aerial maps and views he studied during the war echo in his structured fields of color. His palette in the early 1960s, infused with red (always his favorite), earthy browns, and khaki, directly reflects these wartime experiences. In postwar Britain, Irvin’s bold embrace of reds stood out against the muted palettes of his contemporaries, where earthy tones and restraint were the norm at the time. Far from decorative, his use of the color was immersive and emotionally charged, echoing the intensity of Abstract Expressionism while asserting a radical new energy in British painting. Yet even here, he was intuitively seeking harmony and complementarity in his colors.
Irvin’s color palette grew richer as paint manufacturers brought out new pigments. Inspired by his love of Henri Matisse he began experimenting with paper cut-out shapes to play with these fresh, vibrant colors. From then on, his contrasts radiated a life-affirming optimism. For Irvin, colors were never neutral, they were emotional states, active agents shaping the mood of a painting. If painting could be seen as a language, colors were his verbs, the elements that propelled the viewer through the work. Every hue was a deliberate choice. While Irvin liked to claim that his paintings should “look like they only took me five minutes to make”, in reality, he worked slowly and deliberately, weighing every decision.
That restlessness, the drive to inject energy and motion into his canvases, was essential to Irvin. London’s fast rhythm mirrored his own high-spirited, exploratory nature, one he shared with his wife, Betty, whom he met at art school at the age of 18. Together they nurtured a lifelong passion for music, theatre, dance, and literature, a source of inspiration that continued to ignite his energy throughout his life. His paintings radiate that vitality, bursting with the energy he hoped to transmit to his viewers. He sought not only to depict movement but to provoke an instinctual, almost physical response in his audience. For Irvin, abstraction was the perfect vehicle to express the emotional dynamics of existence. Collectively, his works evoke the clamor of urban life while hinting at inner struggles. His signature marks stand as the truest record of his presence in paint, a testament to the spirited, joyful, and profoundly generous human being that Albert Irvin was.
Albert Irvin (1922–2015, lived and worked in London, UK) studied at Northampton School of Art and later at Goldsmiths College, London, where he also taught from 1962 to 1983. Irvin held solo exhibitions at 57 Gallery, London; Gimpel Fils, London; and had a major retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, London. His work featured in group shows nationally and internationally and is held in collections including Tate, the Royal Collection, the British Council, the Royal Academy and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He received numerous honours, including an Arts Council Travel Award in 1968, an Arts Council Major Award, and was elected a Royal Academician in 1998. In 2013 he was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to British art.