Dan Flavin

For more than thirty years, Dan Flavin (b. 1933, New York; d. 1996, New York) devised a radical new art form that circumvented the limits imposed by frames, pedestals, and other conventions of display. His embrace of the unadorned fluorescent fixture as an aesthetic object aligned him with a generation of artists whose use of industrial materials, emphasis on elementary forms, and nonhierarchical relationships among component parts became the salient characteristics of Minimalism.

In 1963, Flavin started to make artwork with ordinary fluorescent lights. In his words, “electric light is just another instrument”. His was an important departure from the traditional conventions that would come to define his art for the rest of his life. Although subject to limitations in the use of color and to the standard size of fluorescent lights, Flavin soon developed his own architecturally dynamic vocabulary of “corners,” “monuments,” “barriers,” and “corridors.” With his use of a widely available plain industrial material, his attention to the circumstance of the observer, and his emphasis on elementary forms, Flavin was soon considered a key figure of Minimalism.