Dan Flavin was one of the founding fathers of Minimalism. Starting in the 1960s, he spent more than three decades experimenting with light in all its simplicity and subtlety. Flavin radically limited his working materials to standard fluorescent tubes that could be purchased in ordinary shops, and elevated them to art. This also meant that his colour palette was restricted to red, blue, green, pink, ultraviolet, yellow and four different whites. The tubes tended to be straight, although curved shapes were occasionally available in certain outlets. Within this vocabulary, Flavin started to investigate the behaviour of light. It’s primary colours are red, blue and green, and thus not red, blue and yellow as with pigment. Mixing the colours of visible light creates surprising results that are utterly different to paint.
Flavin was raised in Queens. His Irish Catholic parents sent him to a minor seminary school, where he encountered religious art and Expressionist works by the French painter Georges Rouault. In 1953, Flavin trained as a meteorologist with the US Air Force. A few years later, he attended the School for Social Research in New York, after which he studied art history at Columbia University. As an artist, he was largely self-taught. Flavin first used fluorescent lamps in the early 1960s: in the series Icons, he attached them to monochrome rectangles made of wood or Formica. The term ‘icon’ not only referenced Byzantine painting, but also, in an ironic way, his Catholic upbringing. With their kitschy appearance and cheap materials, his icons were anything but sacred. Flavin soon abandon other materials and devoted himself exclusively to light.
Dan Flavin was working in post-war America. While Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning focused on vivid, painterly gestures, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko were creating large, vibrant colour field paintings with a spiritual air. Flavin’s work can be linked to Rothko’s ‘luminous’ monochrome surfaces and Newman’s ‘zips’, narrow strips of paint that tore through broad expanses of colour. But where the canvases of the latter painters stopped, Flavin’s light extended. He brought the surrounding space into his work, which evolved into ‘corridors’, ‘barriers’ and ‘corner pieces’, before eventually filling entire rooms: gangways full of sloping lights, trellises of fluorescent tubes that blocked passageways, and illuminated, monochrome, space-defining surfaces.
In Flavin’s series of Monuments to the Russian modernist artist Vladimir Tatlin, on which he worked from 1964 to 1990, the artist played with the idea of the ‘timeless’ memorial. Yet in his case, their longevity was determined by the lifespan of the lamps. At the end of his career, Flavin realised several monumental light installations for celebrated locations, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the church in New York that has housed the Dan Flavin Art Institute since 1983. Flavin dedicated most of his works to artists who inspired him, including Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Vladimir Tatlin, Barnett Newman, Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd and Roy Lichtenstein. Thanks to his far-reaching experiments with light and the new meaning he gave to pictorial space, Flavin, in turn, was a hugely influential figure for younger artist’s such as Bruce Nauman, James Turell, Olafur Eliasson and Ann Veronica Janssens.
