Dan Flavin: Works from Dia Art Foundation is a focused exploration of American artist Dan Flavin’s practice during the period spanning 1962 to 1974. Flavin was a significant figure in American Minimalism despite his active rejection of the label. In 1963 he began establishing a simplified formal language based on interactions between light and space, which generated a system of material and conceptual parameters - or “situational” phenomenon - through which his works could exist. Using commercially available lamps and standard-issue fluorescent bulbs, the artist discovered a rich vocabulary of possibilities and infinite variations. The featured works encapsulate pivotal moments and key series in Flavin’s oeuvre, concurrently serving as a testament to the enduring relationship between the artist and Dia Art Foundation.

About the artist
Dan Flavin was born in 1933 in New York City. In the mid-1950s he served in the U.S. Air Force, after which he returned to New York, where he studied art history at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University. In 1961 he had his first solo exhibition at the Judson Gallery, New York. Later that year he began experimenting with electric light in a series of works called “icons,” which led him to his first work made solely of fluorescent light, the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi) (1963). Major exhibitions of Flavin’s work include those at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1967); the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1969); and the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany (1989). In 2004 Dia organized a traveling retrospective in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In 1983 Dia opened the Dan Flavin Art Institute (now Dia Bridgehampton), a permanent exhibition designed by the artist in a former firehouse and Baptist church in Bridgehampton, New York. Flavin died in 1996 in Riverhead, New York.