Dan Flavin

For more than three decades, Dan Flavin (1933-1996) vigorously pursued the artistic possibilities of fluorescent light. The artist radically limited his materials to commercially available fluorescent tubing in standard sizes, shapes, and colors, extracting banal hardware from its utilitarian context and inserting it into the world of high art. The resulting body of work at once possesses a straightforward simplicity and a deep sophistication. Utilizing fluorescent light tubing available on the commercial market, Dan Flavin created light installations (or “situations” as he preferred to call them) that became icons of Minimalism. Flavin’s wall- and floor-mounted, site-specific fixtures, composed of intersecting and parallel lines of light in conventional colors, flood spaces with their glow. A number of the sculptures feature tubes traversing corners or doorways, or at a right angle to the wall, further engaging the architecture of a room. As Flavin’s installations grew more complex, so too did the spaces built expressly for the purpose of exhibiting them. In 1959, when Flavin was shortly employed as a guard and elevator operator at the Museum of Modern Art, he met fellow Minimalists Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, and Robert Ryman.

Selected Exhibitions

2016

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, San Francisco, CA

San Francisco American Prints, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

Sebastian Fath Contemporary, Mannheim, Germany

2015

Dan Flavin, 2 Works, Judd Foundation, New York ,NY

Black Sun, Riehen Take an Object, Fondation Beyeler, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Paris Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015, American Icons, RMN Grand Palais, Whitechapel Gallery, London

2006

Gallery Nikki Diana Marquardt, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France

2004

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 

Whiteread, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, NY

2003

Flavin, Andre, Judd, National Gallery of Canada, Halifax

Collection, Nouvelle Presentation, Musee Art Contemporain Lyon, France

Flavin, Judd, Lewitt, Serra: Early Works, Zwierner & Wirth Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

2000

Galerie Trabant, Vienna, Austria

Zwirner & Wirth, New York, New York

1999

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, New York

Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland

1989

Gallery Nikki Diana Marquardt, Paris, France

1987

Gallery Nikki Diana Marquardt, Paris, France