{"data":{"id":"438","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":438,"topgoose_id":2191,"tms_id":438,"display_name":"Dan Flavin","sort_name":"Flavin Dan","display_date":"1933–1996","begin_date":"1933","end_date":"1996","biography":"\u003cp\u003eWhile working as a security guard and elevator operator for New York’s American Museum of Natural History in the early 1960s, Dan Flavin filled his uniform pockets with scribbled ideas for “an electric light art.” This art initially consisted of wall-hung painted wood boxes with attached incandescent bulbs, but experiments with fluorescent tubes in 1963 led Flavin to the medium he would use for the rest of his career. He selected commercially available materials for his light-based sculptures: fluorescent lamps in standard lengths (two, four, six, or eight feet) and colors (red, yellow, blue, green, pink, ultraviolet, and four intensities of white). Once committed to this visual vocabulary, Flavin manipulated the lights in various orientations and combinations—from diagonal presentations to repeating, freestanding installations— for more than three decades.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/1010\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eUntitled\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e features six four-foot tubes in cool white positioned vertically against the wall and one eight-foot bulb that extends to the floor. Flavin resisted the label of Minimalism for such works, yet they share key concerns with that practice of the mid- and late 1960s. Rejecting the conventions of both painting and sculpture, his projects incorporate industrially fabricated, serial parts and make viewers aware of their own bodily presence in relation to the object and—because the light extends beyond the tubes’ physical parameters and into the environment—to the surrounding architecture and ambience.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFlavin dedicated \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/2364\"\u003e\u003cem\u003euntitled (for Robert,\nwith fond regards)\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e to his studio assistant, Robert Skolnik, formerly an art handler at the Whitney. Flavin arranged the eight- foot fluorescent tubes, facing inward and outward, in a grid pattern to be positioned across the corner of a gallery. The relationship between color, form, and site, as Flavin has explained, creates “an optical interplay . . . all modified by reflected color mixes and shadows of the grid structure itself.”\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500021736","wikidata_id":"Q504395","created_at":"2017-08-30T17:12:55.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-13T07:00:11.191-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/438/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/438/exhibitions"}}}}