Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin was an American artist renowned for his innovative use of fluorescent light as a medium, establishing himself as a pivotal figure in the Minimalist art movement. Born in 1933 in Queens, New York, Flavin studied art while serving in the US Air Force between 1954 and 1955, later continuing his education at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and Columbia University.

Flavin’s early works consisted of assemblages from materials culled from the streets of New York, and expressive drawings in the style of his forbearers, the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School. Between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Flavin held several jobs at museums in New York, including as a mail room clerk at the Guggenheim Museum and a guard and elevator operator at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard and Robert Ryman.

Flavin’s ideas for his fluorescent ‘icons’ developed during his time as a security guard at the American Museum of Natural History in the summer of 1961, where, as he recalled, ‘I crammed my uniform pockets with notes for an electric light art.’ Disillusioned with his previous practice, which had largely consisted of assemblages and drawings, he left his job in 1963 to pursue this ambition full-time.

Flavin rejected the term ‘sculpture’ as a descriptor of his works, viewing them as ineffable, ephemeral and wholly dependent on their surroundings. Continuing the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’, he conceived his works as ‘proposals’: stages of enquiry within a larger investigation that would consume him for the rest of his career. Another important source of inspiration was the 1937 memorial sculpture Endless Column by Constantin Brâncuşi, to whom Flavin would dedicate the first work in the ‘Diagonal’ series.

This motif and inventive use of light as medium led to a radical change in the course of Flavin’s practice and of art history as a whole. The artist described the fluorescent light as ‘the radiant tube and the shadow cast by its span seemed ironic enough to hold on alone — a buoyant and relentless gaseous image which, through brilliance, betrayed its physical presence into approximate invisibility.’ The wall behind the light is just as important for the light itself, a canvas of sorts for the bold display of colour, Flavin wrote of having ‘to start from that blank, almost featureless, square face which could become my standard yet variable emblem — the “icon”.’

In 1964 Flavin received an award from the William and Norma Copley Foundation with a recommendation from Marcel Duchamp. In 1983, the Dia Center for the Arts opened the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, New York, creating a permanent space to exhibit the artist’s works. Flavin has been exhibited worldwide and his works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and more. Dan Flavin died in 1996 at the age of 63.