Dan Flavin
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.
[1] During military service in 1954–55, Flavin was trained as an air weather meteorological technician[3] and studied art through the adult extension program of the University of Maryland in Korea.
[11][3] In the summer of 1961, while working as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Flavin started to make sketches for sculptures that incorporated electric lights.
[4] The first works to incorporate electric light were his "Icons" series: eight colored shallow, boxlike square constructions made from various materials such as wood, Formica, or Masonite.
[15] He confined himself to a limited palette (red, blue, green, pink, yellow, ultraviolet, and four different whites[16]) and form (straight two-, four-, six-, and eight-foot tubes, and, beginning in 1972, circles).
[17] In the decades that followed, he continued to use fluorescent structures to explore color, light and sculptural space, in works that filled gallery interiors.
[18] These structures cast both light and an eerily colored shade, while taking a variety of forms, including "corner pieces", "barriers," and "corridors".
The first such corridor, untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg), was constructed for a 1973 solo exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum, and is dedicated to a local gallerist and his wife.
In subsequent barred corridors, Flavin would introduce regular spacing between the individual fixtures, thereby increasing the visibility of the light and allowing the colors to mix.
[24] Flavin generally conceived his sculptures in editions of three or five, but would wait to create individual works until they had been sold to avoid unnecessary production and storage costs.
In memory of Urs Graf" at the Kunstmuseum Basel (conceived 1972, realized 1975);[26] the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands (1977); Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York (1979); United States Courthouse, Anchorage, Alaska (1979–89); the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (1989); the lobby of the MetroTech Center (with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), Brooklyn, New York (1992); seven lampposts outside the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (1994); Hypovereinsbank, Munich (1995); Institut Arbeit und Technik/Wissenschaftspark, Gelsenkirchen, Germany (1996); and the Union Bank of Switzerland, Bern (1996).
Additional sites for Flavin's architectural "interventions" were the Grand Central Station in New York (1976), Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (1996), and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (2000).
His large-scale work in colored fluorescent light for six buildings at the Chinati Foundation was initiated in the early 1980s, although the final plans were not completed until 1996.
It is run by the Dia Art Foundation and houses nine fluorescent light works by Flavin on permanent display in a gallery designed for them.
[36] His first solo exhibition in Latin America was held at Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, in 1998, organized with the Dia Art Foundation (Dan Flavin.
[38] In the late 1970s, he began a partnership with the Dia Art Foundation that resulted in the making of several permanent site-specific installations and led most recently to the organization of the traveling exhibition, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective (2004–2007).
It contains the writing of critics and historians such as Donald Judd, Dore Ashton, Rosalind Krauss, Lawrence Alloway, Germano Celant, Holland Cotter.
[49] In 2010, artists Cindy Hinant and Nicolas Guagnini created the book FLAV, with primary archival texts and correspondence by and about Dan Flavin.
[52] The highest price by one of his artworks in the art market was reached when Alternate Diagonals of March 2, 1964 (to Don Judd) (1964) was sold at Sotheby's New York, on 14 May 2014, for $3,077,000.
