Albert Irvin: To New York and Back Again — Albert Irvin

Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present To New York and Back Again, Albert Irvin’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view at 62 Crosby Street from October 29th to December 16th, 2026. The exhibition captures a watershed moment in the development of Irvin’s mature visual language. Composed long after his conversion from figuration to abstraction, the pieces straddle his visit to the USA and the change in medium from oil to acrylic that followed years later.

In 1968, with the support of an Arts Council Travel Award, Albert Irvin paid an extended visit to American shores, meeting artists including Jack Tworkov and Robert Rauschenberg. The pilgrimage brought him into direct contact with a movement that had already exerted a profound influence on his development: American Abstract Expressionism had come “knocking at the door” of British artists throughout the preceding decade, first appearing in a lone room at the Tate’s 1956 exhibition Modern Art in the United States and then more comprehensively in the 1959 exhibition The New American Painting. It was the latter encounter that finally convinced Irvin to abandon figuration. What he found in the American painters was not a style or sensibility to imitate—theirs were too heterogeneous to copy—but a new conception of what painting might accomplish. The confidence and authority of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning that impressed upon him the possibility of a nonrepresentational language built from shape, color, and mark. Irvin sought to make that language his own, dispensing with the literal vocabulary of his earlier figurative practice—which depicted human elements like “ears and elbows”—without abandoning its fundamental subject: the human condition. To New York and Back Again brings together a selection of works in which Irvin’s encounter with American abstraction opened new possibilities for his ongoing project of communicating the human experience onto canvas.

Irvin’s subject, by his own description, is “the experience of being in the world.” All of his paintings are organized around this theme. In one sense, this means that his paintings are informed by his journeys through the physical world. He was inspired by the Abstract Expressionist idea that you could traverse a surface with a loaded brush as a metaphor for a traversal through an urban landscape. In Irvin’s paintings, each mark recorded both his literal movement within the space of the canvas and the essence of a journey taken through the world he lived in. The paintings’ titles reflect this: from earlier titles which descriptively refer to an abstracted sense of movement (Wanderer (1968), Strike (1968)), to those allusively referring to street names near his studio in Stepney Green (Rampart (1976) and Cephas 1976)). In another sense, Irvin’s subject expresses the inner experience of being in the world: the emotive forces shaping our impressions and perceptions, and which structure the interior drama of our lives. His method, then, is both metaphorical and expressive, his painterly mark-making at once allusive and affectively charged. In his own words: “The painted area, the active area, is the human content, an analogue for my being in the world, for moving through the world, for living and loving.”

In earlier paintings like Wanderer and Strike, Irvin’s exploration of the emotional possibilities of abstraction finds expression in the interplay of complementary color and form. Composed during a brief period in the second half of the 1960s, when Irvin was deeply invested in the possibilities of black paint, in these paintings large zones of black paint are striped by smaller zones of saturated color. The effect is of balance through asymmetry and disparity: an uneven distribution of elements across the canvas that orchestrates the paintings’ emotive tension.

When Irvin finally adopted acrylic paint in 1972, he found new strategies for staging and intensifying this visual drama. The medium’s capacity to be thinned out and layered allowed for energetic experiments with spectrums of substance and opacity: paintings like Rampart and Cephas (both 1976) feature large, liquid blocks of color which compress a Dionysian tangle of superimposed gestures. Acrylic’s quick drying time, combined with Irvin’s practice of stacking large canvases on cans, also allowed him to work with greater immediacy. So too did the medium allow him to experiment with new tools for accessing the canvas more directly; in both Rampart and Cephas, Irvin used squeegees and pieces of corrugated card to scrape and smear the paint across the canvas, as if by a giant palette knife.

One feels in all of these works the immediate presence of the artist’s activity. For Irvin, the mark was ultimately an index of his human presence: the trace of a stroke, a gesture, a decision, and all the chance those movements entail. His paintings retain this aleatory quality, a sense of play through which the activity of painting becomes a record of his own presence in the world. Behind each mark is a great energy—a vitalist impulse that unites the pieces on view. Jackson Pollock famously described painting as “energy made visible”; Irvin’s ambition was to dispose his paintings with as much energy as he could possibly invest in them, finding in color, gesture, shape, and structure some way of expressing what he called “an inextinguishable life force.” To New York and Back Again captures this vital force at a decisive point in Irvin’s development, when a mature abstract language and a new material vocabulary converged in paintings of extraordinary physical and emotional vitality.

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.