DAN FLAVIN
Flavin was born in New York, USA in 1933. He studied at a Catholic seminary from 1947 to 1952, intending to become a priest, but ultimately joined the United States Air Force. During his military service in 1954–55, he studied art under an educational program provided by the University of Maryland to the US military stationed in Korea. After returning to New York, he briefly studied art at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts and the New School for Social Research in 1956 and took drawing and painting classes at Columbia University from 1957 to 1959. While working as a guard at MoMA (New York), Flavin made the acquaintance of contemporary minimalist artists including Sol LeWitt and Robert Ryman. Since 1963, he worked consistently on light sculptures and site-specific installations using fluorescent lights in the commercially available ten colors (blue, green, pink, red, yellow, ultraviolet, and four shades of white) and composed of five forms (circles, and four straight tubes of different lengths). Flavin refused to attribute his work to religious interpretations or specific concepts, instead seeking to direct attention to the very presence of light in space itself. Despite this view, however, many of Flavin’s works are dedicated to individuals whom he admired. As a leading figure in the Minimalism movement in New York in the 1960s, his artworks are found all around the globe. Large installations by the artist have been permanently installed at institutions including the Dan Flavin Art Institute (New York), the Chinati Foundation (Marfa), founded by Donald Judd, and the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart (Berlin). Flavin passed away in 1996.
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Title: untitled(for Ad Reinhardt)1b
Year: 1990
Medium: blue, yellow, pink, red and green fluorescent light
Dimensions: 243.8 x 26.7 x 61 cm (96 x 10 1/2 x 4 in.)
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untitled(for Ad Reinhardt)1b
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Year: 1990In 1963, Flavin created “the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi)” as an homage to the sculptor Brancusi, who is also considered to be a pioneer of minimalism, and his work “Endless Column.”, Throughout almost 30 years of his entire career as an artist, Flavin dedicated his works to hometown acquaintances and artists he admired, with his respect reflected in the subtitles of the pieces. This work is one of ten works that the artist created for Ad Reinhardt, an abstract painter of the same period. Reinhardt is perhaps best known for his series of black abstract paintings. At first glance, it appears as if they have simply been painted over with black, but in fact, they are divided by grids, and painted with overlays of incredibly deep hues of blues, reds, and greens—just enough to be noticeable. The differences in nuance of these different blacks are so subtle that they are only perceptible at length. When looking at Flavin’s work, the light from principally blue, red, and green fluorescent lamps fills the space, each color gently interfering with one another. Flavin himself described this kind of work with light as “situational” works, which are referred to as installations today. His site-specific works from the 1970s onwards could be thought of as the culmination of his theoretical approach, in which the “situation” itself, the very space governed by the light, becomes the work. Despite the difficulty in recreating Reinhardt’s black with the use of light, the spirituality of the work is a continuation of Flavin’s aesthetic sensibilities. Reinhardt left us with the maxim “Art as Art,” and Flavin was well aware of that artist’s pursuit of the purity of art; accordingly, black and light may both have appeared to him as equally revelatory of the nature of art.
Medium: blue, yellow, pink, red and green fluorescent light
Dimensions: 243.8 x 26.7 x 61 cm (96 x 10 1/2 x 4 in.)
Edition: No. 1 of 5
Acquired from Phillips, 2023