Dan Flavin
1933–1996
While 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.
Untitled 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.
Flavin dedicated untitled (for Robert, with fond regards) 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.”
Introduction
Dan Flavin (April 1, 1933 – November 29, 1996) was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.
Wikidata identifier
Q504395
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 29, 2025.
Introduction
After beginning his career as a watercolorist and sculptor, Flavin began to experiment with using light in his constructions. Gradually, his work became more minimalist, featuring readymade flourescent or neon lights of various colors, and their fixtures. Although seemingly impersonal pieces, they often retain a sacred quality, and Flavin would frequently dedicate his works to other artists, further humanizing them. American artist.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, art critic, author, graphic artist, installation artist, light artist, painter, sculptor
ULAN identifier
500021736
Names
Dan Flavin
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 29, 2025.
