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Dan Flavin
The Architecture of Light
November 06, 1999 - February 13, 2000
Featuring a Selection of Key Works from the 1960s to the Late 1980s Dan Flavin: The Architecture of Light, an exhibition drawn from the Guggenheim Museum's extensive collection of the artist's work, opens at the Deutsche Guggenheim on November 6, 1999. The exhibition presents a selection of key works, spanning the early 1960s through the late 1980s, that exemplify the concerns with light and space that occupied the artist throughout his prolific career. Dan Flavin: The Architecture of Light will remain on view through February 13, 2000.
At the forefront of a generation of artists working with new materials in the 1960s, Dan Flavin (1933-1996) was recognized for his pioneering use of light and color divorced from traditional artistic contexts. Employing only commercial fluorescent lights, Flavin devised a radical new art form that circumvented the limits imposed by frames, pedestals, and other conventional means of display. While he first experimented with fluorescent lights in conjunction with wooden or Masonite constructions, by 1963 he had discarded the structural elements in favor of the unadorned fluorescent light. Having embraced the simple fixture as an aesthetic object, Flavin would go on to create increasingly complex installations in an attempt to "combine traditions of painting and sculpture in architecture with acts of electric lights defining space."
The exhibition begins with the seminal piece the nominal three (to William of Ockham), 1963, which Flavin dedicated to the fourteenth-century English scholastic philosopher. In its serial composition, this early work articulates Flavin's use of the fluorescent tube as the basic integer of his nascent practice. The exhibition represents the critical developments in the artist's career, and includes examples of each of the formats he developed over the course of his career. monument on the survival of Mrs. Reppin, 1966, is an early example of Flavin's "corner" pieces.
In his "barrier" pieces of the late 1960s and early 70s, the artist created installations that intervene in the gallery space by physically disrupting it. The exhibition includes the first "barrier" ever created by the artist in 1966, greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), as well as an artificial barrier of blue, red and blue fluorescent light (to Flavin Starbuck Judd), 1968. Another format frequently employed by the artist is evident in his "corridor" pieces, as exemplified in the exhibition by untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg), 1972-73. Additionally, the exhibition includes works from a series dedicated to gallerist Margo Leavin, as an example of Flavin's work in extended series.
While working with a limited vocabulary of commercially produced colors and standard lengths - a palette of blue, green, pink, red, yellow, and four varieties of white, and lengths of two, four, six, and eight feet - Flavin's work creates a deeply nuanced range of effects. The fluorescent glow defies containment and saturates the surroundings with light and color, enveloping the viewer in the process. In this, it underscores the radical and experiential nature of Flavin's practice. Not surprisingly, Flavin rejected such standard art-historical terms as "sculpture" or "environment" in favor of "proposals" or "situations," terms that aptly capture the fluid and contingent sensibility of these pieces. As with other artists of his generation such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris, Flavin favored industrial materials, serial repetition, and elementary forms - hallmarks of what would become Minimal art.
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Yet perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, Flavin rendered the traditional relationships between line, form, light, and color inextricable from the environment in which his work was presented. Recognizing the ability of light to transform space Flavin once commented, "I knew that the actual space of a room could be disrupted and played with by careful, thorough composition of the illuminating equipment…." The works on view in Dan Flavin: The Architecture of Light have been selected with Flavin's words in mind, each engaging with the three-dimensional space of the gallery, both conditioning and being conditioned by the spaces they inhabit.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has had a long-standing relationship with the late artist and his work that predates the opening of the Frank Lloyd Wright building, during which time Flavin was briefly employed at the museum. The artist's work was first exhibited at the museum in 1971, when he was commissioned to create a work for the Sixth Guggenheim International, which subsequently entered the Guggenheim's collection. His representation within the museum's collection was further strengthened with the Guggenheim's acquisition of the Panza Collection of Minimal and Conceptual works from the 1960s and 1970s, which includes a core group of Flavin's work. In 1992, the artist's original conception for his 1971 piece was fully realized in a dramatic, site-specific installation that filled the entire Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda on the occasion of the museum's reopening after a major renovation and expansion project. More recently, the Guggenheim mounted an exhibition of the artist's work at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in 1995. Dan Flavin: The Architecture of Light features work from the Panza acquisition, and highlights the Guggenheim's philosophy of collecting artists' works in depth, an approach which provides a sharp focus within the broader context of an extensive collection of twentieth-century art. Dan Flavin: The Architecture of Light was organized by J. Fiona Ragheb, Associate Curator for Collections and Exhibitions, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Ms. Ragheb, and contributions by Tiffany Bell, Frances Colpitt, Jonathan Crary, Michael Govan, Joseph Kosuth, Michael Newman, and Brydon E. Smith. The catalogue has been designed by Bruce Mau Design, and will be available in English and German editions.
As a posthumous homage to Dan Flavin, a limited and numbered CD with a special design has been created as Edition No. 9 for Deutsche Guggenheim. It includes Richard Tauber's interpretation of Dein ist mein ganzes Herz, which the artist is known to have considered a favorite of his, along with remixes of this piece by Antonelli Electr and Elektro Music Department. Just as the artist himself dedicated many of his works to personally significant people, Deutsche Guggenheim now is dedicating this musical gift to him. Running parallel to the exhibition Dan Flavin: The Architecture of Light, the exhibition Collected Spaces - Collected Dreams will be on view from 20 November 20, 1999 to February 6, 2000 in the Martin-Gropius-Bau. The exhibition is partially funded by the Kultur-Stiftung of the Deutsche Bank. As well as the normal tickets for the exhibitions, a combined ticket costing DM 12 and giving admission to both exhibitions will also be available and a shuttle service will run between the Martin-Gropius-Bau and Deutsche Guggenheim. The shuttle service has been made possible by the kind support of Volkswagen AG's Automobil Forum on Unter den Linden.
Press Conference: Friday, November 5, 1999, 10 a.m.
Images of the exhibition
are available online at www.photo-files.de/guggenheim in a 300 dpi quality.
Further information at
Manager: Svenja Gräfin von Reichenbach
Press: Sara Bernshausen
Phone: +49-30-202093-14
Fax: +49-30-202093-20
email: berlin.guggenheim@db.com
Internet: www.deutsche-guggenheim.de
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