Dan Flavin

La Paz Community School

Mendoza

Dan Flavin

• Born on April 1, 1933 in New York City

• Served in the US Air Force as an air weather meteorological technician in Korea, after which he returned to New York and attended art history classes at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University

• American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.

Early Work

• The first works to incorporate electric light were his "Icons" series

• Colored square box-forms, these were fluorescent tubes with incandescent bulbs attached to their sides, and sometimes beveled edges

Mature Work

• The "Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy" completed in 1963, was Flavin's first mature work; it marks the beginning of the artist's exclusive use of fluorescent light as a medium

• In the decades that followed, he continued to use fluorescent structures to explore color, light and sculptural space, in works that filled gallery interiors

• These structures cast both light and an eerily-colored shade, while taking a variety of forms, including "corner pieces", "barriers," and "corridors.”

The Process

• Employing only commercial fluorescent lights in his work, Dan Flavin devised a radical new art form that circumvented the limits imposed by frames, pedestals, or other conventional means of display

• His embrace of the unadorned fluorescent fixture as an aesthetic object placed him at the forefront of 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

The Nominal Three

The nominal three (to William of Ockham), dedicated to the 14th-century English philosopher, exemplifies Flavin’s use of the fluorescent tube as a basic building block

Untitled (To a man, George McGovern) 2, 1972