Museums

Reviews by Christopher Knight (C.K.).Compiled by Grace Krilanovich.

Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries Light and Space, the sensual art of perceptual discovery that Robert Irwin pioneered in the 1960s, is now synonymous with Los Angeles’ emergence over the last half-century as a distinctive cultural powerhouse. With human perception as his inexhaustible subject, Irwin is, at 79, an eminence of postwar American art. This tightly focused career survey includes a new installation, fittingly titled “Light and Space,” composed of scores of colorless fluorescent lights arrayed across a very large wall in an otherwise unlighted room. The experience recalls encountering stained-glass windows in a Gothic church but without the grandiosity or intimation of supernatural spirit. The effect is spellbinding (C.K.). Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, downtown, 1001 Kettner Blvd., San Diego. Fri.-Mon. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Wed. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Thu. 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; ends April 13. (858) 454-3541.

Michael Asher There is something Piranesian about Asher’s marvelous temporary installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, with its extraordinary tangle of architectural fragments that fill the main room. Piranesi’s “Carceri d’invenzione” (Imaginary Prisons) were a suite of richly textured, 18th century engravings showing elaborate, fictional labyrinths from which there seems to be no escape. Asher re-created all the stud walls that have been built for every exhibition since the Santa Monica Museum relocated to Bergamot Station in May 1998. In places, the metal stud “bars,” already rather prison-like, are dense enough to become nearly opaque walls, obstructing views, blocking light and creating unexpected solidity in otherwise empty space. They ratchet up a sensation of entrapment. The museum feels vaguely but viscerally oppressive, like an inevitably restrictive place of limitations (C.K.). Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building G1, Santa Monica. Tue.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; closed Sun.-Mon.; ends April 12. (310) 586-6488.