Dan Flavin, preparatory drawing for Heiner Friedrich, Cologne, 1976
David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by American artist Dan Flavin (1933–1996) at the gallery’s London location. From 1963 until his death in 1996, Flavin produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially available fluorescent lamps to create installations (or "situations," as he preferred to call them) of light and color. Presented across two floors, the works on view re-create the artist’s momentous colored fluorescent light exhibitions, which took place at Leo Castelli Gallery and Galerie Heiner Friedrich in New York and Cologne in 1976, and figure as important early instances of his innovative use of color and serial progressions in response to architectural space.
Each of the nine colors that comprised the artist’s visual vocabulary during these years—red, pink, blue, green, yellow, cool white, daylight, warm white, and soft white—will be represented within the show. In bringing these works back together, the exhibition will provide a rare opportunity to directly experience the artist’s singular vision and ability to redefine space through everyday materials.
David Zwirner has represented the Estate of Dan Flavin since 2009, and this will be the gallery’s first presentation of the artist’s work in London. A concurrent exhibition, Dan Flavin: Kornblee Gallery 1967, will be on view at the gallery’s 34 East 69th Street location in New York.
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Image: Installation view, Dan Flavin: colored fluorescent light, David Zwirner, London, 2023
Dan Flavin, preparatory drawing for Heiner Friedrich, Cologne, 1976
In 1976, Dan Flavin presented pivotal colored fluorescent light exhibitions at Leo Castelli Gallery and Galerie Heiner Friedrich in New York and Cologne. The featured works marked important early instances of his innovative use of color and serial progressions in response to architectural space, as well as early examples of repeated forms.
Dan Flavin and Leo Castelli at the artist's home in Garrison, New York, 1975 (left); Installation view, Dan Flavin, Heiner Friedrich, Inc., New York, 1976 (right)
Installation view, Dan Flavin: colored fluorescent light, David Zwirner, London, 2023
“I know now that I can reiterate any part of my fluorescent light system as adequate. Elements of parts of that system simply alter in situation installation. They lack the look of history. I sense no stylistic or structural development of any significance within my proposal—only shifts in partitive emphasis—modifying and addable without intrinsic change.... It is as though my system synonymizes its past, present, and future states without incurring a loss of relevance.”
—Dan Flavin, “Some Remarks,” Artforum, 1966
Untitled (fondly, to "Phip") (1976) belongs to a series of two works dedicated to Philippa de Menil, one of the founders of the Dia Art Foundation. According to the artist’s catalog raisonné: “When exhibited in 1976, this work and the following were each installed twice along one wall. Two lights were positioned along the outside edges of the wall and the other two were in the middle, with equal space between them.”
Installation view, Dan Flavin: colored fluorescent light, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Cologne, 1976
“Flavin introduced a new aspect to visual art: the pouring, or flooding of color into space. By diffusing in all directions, the light creates a volume of color. Within this volume, however, color becomes visible only when it touches a reflecting plane, such as a wall, a floor, the ceiling, furniture or people.... Perhaps the most obvious comparisons are with stained glass windows in cathedrals.... Here as there is endlessness.”
—Marianne Stockebrand, “Pink, Yellow, Blue, Green & Other Colors in the Work of Dan Flavin,” lecture given at the Dia Center for the Arts, 1996
Installation view, Dan Flavin: colored fluorescent light, David Zwirner, London, 2023
“I do not like the term ‘environment’ associated with my proposal.... I intend rapid comprehensions—get in and get out situations. I think that one has explicit moments with such particular light-space.”
—Dan Flavin, unpublished letter to Jan van der Marck, dated June 17, 1967
Installation view, Dan Flavin: colored fluorescent light, David Zwirner, London, 2023
“An installation by Flavin releases light from its customary obligation to illuminate objects, to target and isolate a point of preexisting interest, to convert its object to an objectified image.... Liberated from causes and effects, Flavin’s light bears color rather than illuminating it.”
—Richard Shiff, in Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions, 2010
Installation view, Dan Flavin: colored fluorescent light, David Zwirner, London, 2023
“Flavin’s abstractions create a soft but precise color geometry.... The mixing of colored light differs from the mixing of a viscous pigment, and light is not as static, though it does seem still. What remains so mesmerizing, however, is that we imagine the slow-motion effect of colors mixing in space.”
—Michael Auping, in Dan Flavin: Corners, Barriers and Corridors, 2016
Installation view, Dan Flavin: colored fluorescent light, David Zwirner, London, 2023
On View in New York
Dan Flavin: Kornblee Gallery 1967
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