Dan Flavin
Artist Biography
Utilizing fluorescent light tubing available on the commercial market, Dan Flavin created light installations (or “situations” as he preferred to call them) that became icons of Minimalism. Flavin’s wall- and floor-mounted, site-specific fixtures, composed of intersecting and parallel lines of light in conventional colors, flood spaces with their glow. A number of the sculptures feature tubes traversing corners or doorways, or at a right angle to the wall, further engaging the architecture of a room. As Flavin’s installations grew more complex, so too did the spaces built expressly for the purpose of exhibiting them. In 1959, when Flavin was shortly employed as a guard and elevator operator at the Museum of Modern Art, he met fellow Minimalists Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, and Robert Ryman.