Between the forties and the seventies Albert Irvin’s style of painting moved through a series of transitions that broadly reflected the dominant trends of the time. Beginning in the realms of brooding neo-romanticism, in the fifties he availed himself of abstract painting which became a foundational tenet of his life’s work. Through the sixties and seventies he used a variety of abstract painterly styles, which won Irvin a degree of critical recognition and saw his work acquired by the Arts Council and Government Art Collection among other public collections.

Not until the mid-eighties did Irvin develop a personally distinctive idiom. This idiom he used consistently in paintings made from that time until his death in 2015. He worked using fulgent, saturated colours—often blue, red, green, pink and orange—applied with a broad brush. His paintings were composed from dense webs of ideogrammatic patterns: symbol-like units akin to noughts and crosses, punctuation marks, simple squares and rhomboids, the hash (#) sign, and so on. These ideograms sometimes bare a superficial resemblance to liquorice allsorts, with layered stripes of contrasting colours, often organised at right angles to neighbouring units. The brush marks are strongly apparent, especially those applied at the surface, yet they are subsumed in constellations that create overarching structural patterns in his work.

Working with acrylic, Irvin achieved a rich plastic quality in his paint. The style of his mature paintings often involved subtle gradients of opacity and transparency. Longer strokes of the brush stretched the paint thinly, exposing the underlying shapes or colours. He frequently applied brushstrokes wet on wet following and reiterating the same lines, creating scumble of vibrant secondary and tertiary colours. Other paintings use declarative blocks of richly saturated opaque colour.

It is unclear what motivated Irvin’s late mature style. Artwork titles range widely from a literal, even pedantic identification of specific streets and areas of London—Bankside, Stepney and so on—to elusive names or concepts such as Dorrit and Fortune. The playful formality of Irvin’s definitive period suggests that such titles were applied in retrospect as identifier tags, after the improvised patterns and colours and ideograms had settled into place.