Having started out in the 1950s as a figurative artist of the Kitchen Sink School of the London Group, Irvin managed to break free from its constraints after discovering Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko at a famous Tate exhibition in 1956. He reinvented himself as an exponent of a dazzlingly vigorous Abstract Expressionism, becoming one of Britain’s most respected abstract artists and a true colourist. What is going on the canvas is not a picture but an event and the image would be the result of this encounter.

Ideas of an intellectual nature only come to fruition when the time is right and they coincide with events and opportunities of a practical nature. This certainly seemed to be the case with Irvin when he got the opportunity to move from his domestic sized studio in his house, to a large warehouse sized studio at St. Katharine Dock towards the end of the 60’s, which allowed him to make large works, that up until then, he could only have imagined.