Dan Flavin

Showcasing Dan Flavin’s “corner,” “barrier,” and “corridor” works, this catalogue explores the artist’s core sculptural vocabulary and how his use of fluorescent light forged a new relationship between the art object and its surrounding architecture. This publication examines how Flavin’s light works, which he described as “situations,” function in space, occupying key positions that highlight how the rooms themselves are constructed. The exhibition is not only historically significant, as it mines early explorations in Flavin’s practice, but many of the works are reproduced for the first time in plates that accurately capture their colors. Published on the occasion of the 2015 eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, Corners, Barriers and Corridors takes as its point of departure the artist’s influential show, corners, barriers and corridors in fluorescent light from Dan Flavin, presented at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1973. Above all, the photography reveals the unexpected and powerful interplay between the light of neighboring pieces and the space—the way the walls, floor, and various hues mingle to form unpredicted palettes that reveal what Michael Auping, following Donald Judd, calls the “exoskeleton.” These works, with their immediate relationship to architecture, not only function as color experiments but as structural explorations in light, and in his essay, Auping explores how Flavin’s investigations of corners, barriers, and corridors became an essential part of the way the artist understood space. This publication also features rarely seen photographs of Flavin installing his historic 1973 exhibition, as well as detailed notes by Alexandra Whitney about the works included in the St. Louis presentation. Designed by McCall Associates, in close collaboration with the Estate of Dan Flavin, this catalogue presents an especially significant body of work in a completely new way and offers a vital historical perspective on Flavin’s practice.

"New scholarship and interpretation of Flavin's work also appears in the form of three critical essays by experts and an extensive chronology, comprehensive bibliography, and exhibition history. In addition, this book includes Flavin's text, "'...in daylight or cool white.' an autobiographical sketch," originally published in Artforum in 1965, and two interviews with the artist - one from 1972 and the other from 1982."--BOOK JACKET.

"This book, published on the occasion of Dan Flavin: The Architecture of Light at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, draws upon the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's extensive holdings of the artist's work.".

Transforming color into light is one of the great themes of painting. Dan Flavin (1933-1996) used light as color and material. Employing ordinary neon light tubes, he developed a radical new form of art that freed the "picture" from its frame and turned it into a luminous, space-consuming color object. Expanding the wall painting by turning it into a light installation corresponded with the liberation of light from its traditionally spiritual meaning. Flavin's works recall neon signs from urban nightlife or commonplace living-room lamps. Viewers find themselves immersed in a splendid play of light and color that allows the physical experience of unrestrained art. This publication elucidates the development of Flavin's oeuvre--from the visual objects, the so-called Icons, to the spatial installations with neon tubes--and explains their genesis based on drawings and prints, an independent group of works that testifies to the artist's visual sensitivity. (German edition ISBN 978-3-7757-3522-3) Exhibition schedule: mumok. museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig, Vienna, October 13, 2012-February 3, 2013 - Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, March 16-August 18, 2013

Although the three prominent modernist artists Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman and Dan Flavin each belong to a different generation, all of them have devoted their creativity to abstract art in groundbreaking ways. Featuring each of the three artists in chronological order, so that the sequencing gives rise to enlightening nexuses, this book presents each artists' masterpieces, while juxtaposing seldom-seen works

In making light his primary medium, Dan Flavin (1933-1996) established himself as one of the most innovative and significant artists of the minimalist movement. A new generation encountered Flavin’s work through the critically acclaimed exhibition Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, which opened in October 2004 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Dan Flavin: New Light includes essays that respond to this exhibition and to the renewed interest in Flavin’s work and its place in 20th-century art. In this volume, six leading scholars of contemporary art consider the ambiguities and multiple resonances of Flavin’s light works. Each addresses the ontological complexity of the work--object-based, yet "situational,” and painterly in its deployment of colored light--within the insistently sculptural world of minimalism. The book’s contributors interpret this tension by exploring Flavin’s early assemblages, the relationship of drawing to his installation practice, the specificity of his materials and their operation in actual space, and the openly ambivalent place of Flavin’s work within the history of late modernism. Also available from Yale University Press: DAN FLAVIN: A RETROSPECTIVE (ISBN 0-300-10632-7) DAN FLAVIN: THE COMPLETE LIGHTS (ISBN 0-300-10633-5)

Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form. This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.

Dan Flavin is a key figure in 20th-century art. Leaving the classical genres of painting and sculpture behind him, from the early 1960s he focused entirely on exploring and realizing the artistic potential of light. Using commercial fluorescent light fixtures, he created installations that offered new dimensions on our perception of space. This book is dedicated to his earliest experiments with artificial light: eight wall-mounted pieces created between 1961 and 1964, which he called Icons. The Icons are wooden crates painted in one colour, onto which Flavin mounted coloured lamp bulbs or fluorescent light fixtures. Corinna Thierolf and Johannes Vogt, curators at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, explore the interface the Icons that so virulently forge between the religious mysticism of light, the flickering of the brightly illuminated billboards on Broadway and the neon shrines of popular art.