I was in a museum of few weeks ago, I can’t remember which one I was in, but I do remember taking an interest in an exhibit of fluorescent tubular colored lights. This was not the first time I had seen this artists work, but probably the first time i took more then a moment to understand that there had to be more to what I was looking at.
So I decided to look the artist up and ergo, today’s post!
Interesting man with a lot of thought that went into his sculptures.
Have a great day!
Enjoy,
Love,
Jamie
For more than three decades, Dan Flavin (1933-1996) vigorously pursued the artistic possibilities of fluorescent light. The artist radically limited his materials to commercially available fluorescent tubing in standard sizes, shapes, and colors, extracting banal hardware from its utilitarian context and inserting it into the world of high art.
The resulting body of work at once possesses a straightforward simplicity and a deep sophistication.
Dan Flavin took an everyday object, found in most stores, homes and offices, and made it extraordinary. He used fluorescent lights of varying lengths and colors and arranged them to create sculptures of light.
DAN FLAVINS career-long exploration of an art of light, situated outside the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture, established him as a progenitor and chief exponent of minimalism. Though Flavin (1933–1996) is one of the most important and influential artists of the late 20th century,
“Dan Flavin’s light sculptures illuminate everything around them,” Stamberg reports. “His fluorescent lights don’t just hang there. They inhabit space. They wash the walls with color, they mix colors so the white walls seem painted. They bathe space — and visitors — in a warm and completely artificial glow.”
Steve Morse helped build some of the pieces. He says Flavin, who died in 1996, didn’t have an interest in the hard physics of lights, but he did have an interest in their blended effects.
Though Flavin’s lights often evoke a cheerful response from visitors, he does have darker pieces.
One (monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush), created in response to the Vietnam War, is made from blood-colored tubes that jut off the wall aggressively — invading the viewer’s space.
“Even though the work is entirely abstract, it has an incredible range of emotion, from elation to tragic to ironic to playful, with a single medium.”
House of Turquoise