Text by Rainer Fuchs, Karola Kraus, Stefan Neuner, Juliane Rebentisch, Roland Wäspe.
The years 1955–1965 saw artists wreaking havoc with the parameters of painting. If Abstract Expressionists had proposed art as the manipulation of paint on a flat plane, the American artist Dan Flavin further refined art as the manipulation of light itself. Starting out as a convert to Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s, Flavin quickly disposed of painting’s “frame,” as sculptural light object. He first used fluorescent light in a 1961 series of square boxes with lights attached to the sides, titled Icons. The spiritual connotations of the title were soon eschewed for a radical materiality: “It is what it is, and it ain’t nothin’ else,” he famously once said of his work: “everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered.” By using such an everyday material (neon tubing) and arranging it in simple compositions (in rows, or as diagonals, grids, right angles, arcs), Flavin attained a powerful combination of ordinariness and grandeur, and a purity on a par with the modernist artists to whom he dedicated works--Brancusi, Mondrian, Tatlin. This catalogue offers the broadest appraisal of Flavin’s achievement to date. With 200 color plates, it traces his development, from the early painted objects to the first neon tubes, beginning with the “Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi),” and beyond. Also included here are his much admired drawings and prints.
Dan Flavin (1933–1996) was born in New York to Irish-Catholic parents. During military service in 1954–55, he was trained as a meteorological technician; returning to New York in 1956, he studied art at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and at Columbia University. Following his development of neon sculpture, Flavin’s first museum exhibition was held at the St Louis Art Museum in 1973. Just two days before his death in November 1996, Flavin completed the design for his famous installation at the Menil Collection in Houston.
"It all seems so simple: off-the-shelf fluorescent tubes in usually empty rooms—familiar objects, straightforward situations. And yet," Juliane Rebentisch writes in Hatje Cantz's excellent new monograph on Dan Flavin, the artist's work "raises a series of questions that lead to the heart of how we understand art in general: how do we have to conceive the relationships between art and design, between the aesthetic and the everyday, between subject and objects, between work and situation, between seriality and site-specificity, between the sublime and the banal? And finally, through and past all these questions: however immediately evident our impression of Flavin's works may be, how can we define their presence more closely?" Featured image, "Untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1B" (1978), is reproduced from Dan Flavin: Lights, published to accompany the late artist's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, which closes this weekend before traveling to Switzerland in March. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.25 x 10.5 in. / 260 pgs / 200 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $30.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $40 ISBN: 9783775735230 PUBLISHER: Hatje Cantz AVAILABLE: 2/28/2013 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Rainer Fuchs, Karola Kraus, Stefan Neuner, Juliane Rebentisch, Roland Wäspe.
The years 1955–1965 saw artists wreaking havoc with the parameters of painting. If Abstract Expressionists had proposed art as the manipulation of paint on a flat plane, the American artist Dan Flavin further refined art as the manipulation of light itself. Starting out as a convert to Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s, Flavin quickly disposed of painting’s “frame,” as sculptural light object. He first used fluorescent light in a 1961 series of square boxes with lights attached to the sides, titled Icons. The spiritual connotations of the title were soon eschewed for a radical materiality: “It is what it is, and it ain’t nothin’ else,” he famously once said of his work: “everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered.” By using such an everyday material (neon tubing) and arranging it in simple compositions (in rows, or as diagonals, grids, right angles, arcs), Flavin attained a powerful combination of ordinariness and grandeur, and a purity on a par with the modernist artists to whom he dedicated works--Brancusi, Mondrian, Tatlin. This catalogue offers the broadest appraisal of Flavin’s achievement to date. With 200 color plates, it traces his development, from the early painted objects to the first neon tubes, beginning with the “Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi),” and beyond. Also included here are his much admired drawings and prints.
Dan Flavin (1933–1996) was born in New York to Irish-Catholic parents. During military service in 1954–55, he was trained as a meteorological technician; returning to New York in 1956, he studied art at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and at Columbia University. Following his development of neon sculpture, Flavin’s first museum exhibition was held at the St Louis Art Museum in 1973. Just two days before his death in November 1996, Flavin completed the design for his famous installation at the Menil Collection in Houston.
