Dan Flavin carved his niche in twentieth-century American art in 1963 when he hung a single, golden, off-the-rack fluorescent light at the Green Gallery in New York. The exhibition was a revelation. By using light as his medium, Flavin stretched the possibility of what sculpture could be to include space itself: “the actual space of a room,” he would write, “can be disrupted and played with by careful, thorough composition of the illuminating equiment.” Decades later, his light works retain their capacity for epiphany: in 2006, critic Eliza Williams wrote in Flash Art of his posthumous show at the Hayward Gallery, London, “Whether making a nod to religion or not, Flavin’s lights undoubtedly transcend their everyday use to create an atmosphere that is entrancing and which at times even appears to be whispering to you, albeit in a low, technological hum.”
Flavin was born in New York City in 1933 and died in 1996 at the age of sixty-three. He was raised in Brooklyn and educated in Catholic schools, as his parents expected him to become a priest. He called his fluorescent works “icons,” explaining “I used the word ‘icon’ as descriptive, not of a strictly religious object, but of one that is based on a hierarchical relationship of light over, under, against and with a square-fronted structure full of paint ‘light.’” After graduating from parochial high school, he enlisted in the United States Air Force and was stationed in Korea. Upon returning to New York, Flavin enrolled in drawing and painting classes at Hans Hoffman’s Eighth Street School and art history classes at the New School for Social Research. Taken with art history, he finished three semesters at Columbia University while continuing to make drawings and small watercolor paintings.
For many years Dan Flavin was represented by the Leo Castelli Gallery. In 1991 he briefly joined the Pace Gallery. He completed his first series of prints at Crown Point Press in 1974, and a second project in 1978. In 1983, with sponsorship by the Dia Art Foundation, he opened the Dan Flavin Art Institute, a permanent installation of lights in Bridgehampton, New York. The Dia Foundation also organized Flavin’s first comprehensive retrospective in 2005 in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The show traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and to Europe. Inquiries about the Dan Flavin estate should be directed to the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York or the Annemarie Verna Gallery in Zurich.
- Rachel Lyon
