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Lot Essay
Spanning eight feet in width, Dan Flavin’s Untitled (1964) is a panoramic altar of red and yellow light. It bathes its surroundings in a warm golden glow, and reflects the artist’s career-long investigation into the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture. With his markedly purified approach to form and colour, Flavin rose to prominence as one of Minimalism’s most iconic practitioners in the 1960s. Emerging in New York in the late 1950s, these artists—including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris—were conceptual in their approach, interested in freeing art from its illusionistic, expressive traditions to produce autonomous presences to be experienced in real space and time. Seeking to simulate the austerity of the machine-made, their works are distinguished by seriality, hard-edged geometry and asceticism. The present work, composed of two fluorescent tubes of different lengths and colours, combines industrial character with sublime ethereality. Executed in 1964, a year after Flavin arrived at his breakthrough idea of using the readily available light fixtures, it marks an early triumph of the artist’s career-defining sculptural clarity.
Born in New York in 1933, Flavin served in the meteorology branch of the US Air Force and the National Weather Analysis Centre before briefly attending Hans Hofmann’s acclaimed School of Fine Arts in 1956. Subsequently, he studied art history at Columbia University, and spent several early years of his artistic career making small paintings and drawing in the style of Abstract Expressionism. He began to explore the sculptural possibilities of store-bought light fixtures in 1963. Hanging a gold lamp diagonally across his studio wall, he created the first work in what would come to be his signature and exclusive mode of expression, The Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi). He often experimented with the placement of his fluorescent tubes, fixing them at awkward or impractical angles within a room so as to obstruct mundane daily tasks. The artist used the term ‘situational’ to describe this particular logic, installing light that was ‘somewhat useful, but not so useful’ (D. Flavin quoted in J. Weiss (ed.), Dan Flavin: New Light, New Haven 2006, p. 119). Invoking more perhaps than the term ‘installation’, his ‘situations’ precipitate real changes in the conditions of their environments, transforming their surroundings with vibrant colour and affecting atmosphere.
Flavin’s work nods to the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, whose readymade sculptures produced in the early twentieth century signalled a critical breakdown in the pretences surrounding art’s singularity, authorship and utility. Switching Duchamp’s banal but formally complex objects—urinals, coat racks and bicycle wheels—for basic industrial parts and materials, Minimalism brought the readymade to the new environs of 1960s and 1970s New York. Here, it was levelled as a corrective to the gestural outpourings of the Abstract Expressionist painting that had held sway in the previous decade. But even as he seemed to turn away from subjective content, Flavin’s art nevertheless expresses a quiet sensibility and often Romantic visual vocabulary. The fluorescent lights—gases and phosphors within each tube emanate vivid colour when charged with an electric current—have stirred comparisons to icons, stained-glass windows in gothic cathedrals, monuments, and the Kantian sublime. Indeed, Untitled represents a boundlessness in Flavin’s art that, as art historian Roberta Smith has described, reaches a ‘profound, even ecstatic beauty’ (R. Smith, ‘Dan Flavin, 63, Sculptor Of Fluorescent Light, Dies’, New York Times, 4 December 1996).
Born in New York in 1933, Flavin served in the meteorology branch of the US Air Force and the National Weather Analysis Centre before briefly attending Hans Hofmann’s acclaimed School of Fine Arts in 1956. Subsequently, he studied art history at Columbia University, and spent several early years of his artistic career making small paintings and drawing in the style of Abstract Expressionism. He began to explore the sculptural possibilities of store-bought light fixtures in 1963. Hanging a gold lamp diagonally across his studio wall, he created the first work in what would come to be his signature and exclusive mode of expression, The Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi). He often experimented with the placement of his fluorescent tubes, fixing them at awkward or impractical angles within a room so as to obstruct mundane daily tasks. The artist used the term ‘situational’ to describe this particular logic, installing light that was ‘somewhat useful, but not so useful’ (D. Flavin quoted in J. Weiss (ed.), Dan Flavin: New Light, New Haven 2006, p. 119). Invoking more perhaps than the term ‘installation’, his ‘situations’ precipitate real changes in the conditions of their environments, transforming their surroundings with vibrant colour and affecting atmosphere.
Flavin’s work nods to the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, whose readymade sculptures produced in the early twentieth century signalled a critical breakdown in the pretences surrounding art’s singularity, authorship and utility. Switching Duchamp’s banal but formally complex objects—urinals, coat racks and bicycle wheels—for basic industrial parts and materials, Minimalism brought the readymade to the new environs of 1960s and 1970s New York. Here, it was levelled as a corrective to the gestural outpourings of the Abstract Expressionist painting that had held sway in the previous decade. But even as he seemed to turn away from subjective content, Flavin’s art nevertheless expresses a quiet sensibility and often Romantic visual vocabulary. The fluorescent lights—gases and phosphors within each tube emanate vivid colour when charged with an electric current—have stirred comparisons to icons, stained-glass windows in gothic cathedrals, monuments, and the Kantian sublime. Indeed, Untitled represents a boundlessness in Flavin’s art that, as art historian Roberta Smith has described, reaches a ‘profound, even ecstatic beauty’ (R. Smith, ‘Dan Flavin, 63, Sculptor Of Fluorescent Light, Dies’, New York Times, 4 December 1996).