Kahlil Robert Irving

Kahlil Robert Irving (b. 1992, San Diego, California) constructs deeply layered ceramic sculptures, paintings, and installations with dense strata of references and citations, awaiting the viewer’s exploration without ever offering transparent legibility. His process is, above all, intuitive. He has explained that, “the practice of making art for me is developed in relation to processing the world around me.” On a daily basis, he might draw from found objects that he collects, tabs in his web browser, and the experience of growing up in the postindustrial city of St. Louis. Ultimately, Irving’s work is about the preservation of history and memory, but with the important caveat that the past always exists within the present.

Irving's work has been exhibited in solo presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas. Group exhibitions include those at the Whitney Museum, New York; the New Museum, New York; the Singapore Biennial; Abrons Art Center, New York; the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, San Francisco; and Mass MOCA, North Adams, among others. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; and the RISD Museum, Rhode Island, among others. He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2015 and MFA (Fellow) from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University in St. Louis in 2017.

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