Dan Flavin's Light Works Illuminate At LACMA

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to minimalist artist Dan Flavin's full career. Organized by Dia Art Foundation in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and co-curated by Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, and Tiffany Bell, Director of the Dan Flavin catalogue raisonné, the exhibition features more than forty of Flavin's seminal fluorescent light works.

Also presented is a special reconstruction of the corridors made for the E.F. Hauserman Co. showroom, formerly located at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. Dan Flavin: A Retrospective opens at LACMA on May 13, 2007 and remains on view through August 12, 2007-it will be the final destination of a multi-venue tour.

"Perhaps because Flavin is known so well as one of the founders of minimalism, his work has rarely been considered in all of its breadth and innovation before this retrospective," said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. "Flavin was one of the inventors of what we now know as 'installation art' and his groundbreaking use of color and light in architecture has been emulated not only in art, but in design and architecture. I count him among the most important figures in twentieth century art."

Regarded as one of the most innovative artists of his generation, Flavin is best known for creating art almost entirely of commercially-available fluorescent light tubes. Unusually situated outside the mediums of painting and sculpture, his simple yet systematic light works often featured ten colors and five shapes-one circular and four straight fixtures of different lengths. Although he used common materials, Flavin's art is complex in design and often relates to specific architectural contexts.

Dan Flavin: A Retrospective showcases the chronological development of Flavin's work over the course of thirty years, demonstrating the various means through which he experimented with light, color, seriality, and the coordinates of interior space. The exhibition includes the full range of his work, many of which are specifically dedicated to modernist predecessors and contemporary artists who inspired him, such as Constantin Brancusi, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, and Henri Matisse. Other dedications reveal Flavin's commitment to the politics of his time and his attempt to reinvent the genre of the commemorative monument.

Some of Flavin's early works, such as his "icons" series made from 1961 to 1963, feature several constructed boxes with attached incandescent or fluorescent lights. Works such as icon I (the heart) (to the light of Sean McGovern which blesses everyone) (1961-62) signifies Flavin's invention of an object that is neither a painting nor sculpture yet incorporates elements of both. Later, Flavin moved into his most recognized style of art composed solely of fluorescent light. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's readymade, the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi) (1963) is the first example of Flavin's utilization of standardized, unaltered light tubes and comprises a yellow, eight-foot long fluorescent bulb available from hardware stores in prefabricated lengths and colors.

In 1964, Flavin dedicated a series of works to Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. His well-known "monuments" to V. Tatlin (1964-1981) mimics Tatlin's ideas of Utopian architecture, and comprises the chief examples of Flavin's principles of seriality and permutation. The range of Flavin's content is represented by pieces that include political subjects, such as monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) (1966), an installation of four red fluorescent lights in the form of a crossbow that exude a powerful, but dim, bloodlike glow to commemorate the Vietnam War.

At each venue, the exhibition has been reshaped in content and presentation in relation to the architecture and opportunities that the spaces have provided. For example, when the exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Flavin's famous Chicago 1967 alternating pink and "gold" installation was recreated. In Los Angeles, the exhibition will include a major reconstruction of three spectacular corridors Flavin made for the E.F. Hauserman Co. showroom. Commissioned by
architects and designers Massimo and Lella Vignelli, the installation opened at the Pacific Design Center in March, 1982, to great acclaim. Upon its dismantling in 1984, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles acquired one of the corridors, which will be included in LACMA's presentation.

About Flavin

Dan Flavin was born on April 1, 1933, in New York City. In the mid 1950s, he served in the U.S. Air Force as a meteorological technician in Korea. Afterward, he returned to New York to take various art classes at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. While at Columbia in 1959, he began to make assemblages and collages. This lead to his first solo exhibition in 1961 at the Judson Gallery in New York, and later that same year, he began experimenting with the "icons."

Flavin's use of unadorned fluorescent light placed him at the forefront of a generation of artists, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris. He became known as the progenitor of minimal art through inclusion in key group exhibitions such as Black, White, and Gray at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1964 and Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 1966. He was featured in the Minimal Art exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague in 1968, and continued to exhibit nationally and internationally until his death in 1996 of complications from diabetes.

Catalogues

Dan Flavin: A Retrospective is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue and catalogue raisonné. Both are co-published by Dia Art Foundation and Yale University Press, and represent over five years of scholarly research and previously unavailable information about Flavin's work. The catalogue is the first comprehensive book about the artist and comprises three essays by Michael Govan, Tiffany Bell, and Brydon E. Smith, a selected exhibition list focusing on Flavin's own installations, a comprehensive bibliography, and a chronology of his life. The 208-page publication, featuring 150 four-color and forty black-and-white illustrations, is available for purchase for $45 at the LACMA Plaza Gift Store.

In addition, Tiffany Bell has prepared a catalogue raisonné featuring complete photographic documentation of Flavin's light works. Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights 1961-1996 is the first publication to present all of Flavin's lights together and includes a photograph and/or a graphic diagram for each work represented as well as comprehensive information about its construction, exhibition history, and appearance in other publications. The 432-page cloth-bound boxed edition, which includes 520 four-color and sixty black-and-white illustrations as well as a copy of the exhibition catalogue, is available for purchase for $160 at the LACMA Plaza Gift Store. -- www.lacma.org