Fidelio , 2012, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 120 in. Albert Irvin Fidelio 26 July - 1 September 2012 Private View: Thursday 26 July, 6-9pm On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, Gimpel Fils are holding an exhibition of Albert Irvin's paintings. Irvin has chosen Fidelio as the title, for a number of reasons. There is his fidelity to abstraction, a consistent abstraction in which, over the decades, the artist has been careful to eschew figuration in any form. A S Byatt observed in a text on the artist, 'It is art about experiencing the world', adding, about the paintings' titles 'They are both arbitrary and not, a kind of notation of his life, street-names of London where his studio is... which have a resonance of their own'. Irvin has often referred to the grounding of his practice in the material circumstances of his own life. In an interview given in Dublin, Irvin said : "I don't want to depict or describe appearances - I want to make a kind of pain...