Artists & Works

STYLE: TOTAL ART,
HOMAGE TO PICASSO

Dan Flavin studied art during his military service and then at several institutions in New York. His early work was derivative of Abstract-expressionism, but in 1961 he began to make sketches in which electric light was incorporated. He first showed light sculpture made with florescent tubes in 1964, and by 1968 he had developed this idea to room-sized environments. This work has been shown all over the world, particularly in such art fairs as Documenta and the Venice Biennale. Flavin has also had many important commissions for his light sculptures and installations.

Flavin used fluorescent tubes not only to achieve minimalist literalness, but also to reference ancient mystical notions of light as a medium of transcendence. He called his artworks “proposals,” referring to both the idea and the result, including this print for the Homage to Picasso portfolio.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Alexander Alberro, October, Spring, 97
"Although he did not write as programmatically or systematically as did Judd and Robert Morris, Flavin was an integral figure of the Minimal art movement. In various ways his installations, which he referred to as "proposals," epitomize the type of work Judd called for in his "Specific Objects" (1965), which perhaps more than any other text gave Minimal art its definition. For one thing, Flavin's employment of ready-made fluorescent fixtures parallels Judd's argument that products of mass fabrication are absolutely neutral and that works using these prefabricated materials would have a consistency and stability that all previous plastic arts had lacked. For another, Flavin's fluorescent light installations are in effect a new hybrid of painterly and sculptural objects, thus seeming successfully to create a complex synthetic category that has none of the anthropomorphic projection or rational compositional characteristics Judd found so reprehensible in the European tradition at large. Indeed, I am convinced that when Judd opens "Specific Objects" by stating that "the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture," he is thinking primarily of Flavin's installations with ready-made fluorescent fixtures."