LOTTE MUSEUM OF ART - LMOA

Few artists have been more readily identified with a particular medium than Dan Flavin (b. 1933, New York City; d. 1993, Riverhead, New York). From 1963 through the remainder of his career, Flavin’s work was composed almost entirely of light in the form of commercially available fluorescent tubes in ten colors (blue, green, pink, red, ultraviolet, yellow, and four shades of white) and five shapes (one circular and four straight fixtures of varying lengths).

As a pioneering Minimalist, Flavin aimed to expand his practice beyond the confines of painting and sculpture along with peers like Carl Andre and Donald Judd. Shifting away from the overly gestural canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, they embraced a simplified vocabulary that emphasized seriality and reduced formal devices. Light, with its few limitations and transformative abilities, represented for Flavin an antidote to gestural painting. In his 1965 essay “ . . . in daylight or cool white,” Flavin summed up his practice as “decisions to combine traditions of painting and sculpture in architecture with acts of electric light defining space.” The result is a phenomenological experience where the work of art must be experienced in person by a viewer.