Dan Flavin: Corners, Barriers and Corridors

Description

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner in 2015, Corners, Barriers and Corridors takes as its point of departure Dan Flavin's (1993- 1996) influential corners, barriers and corridors in fluorescent light from Dan Flavin show, presented at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1973. Among the most popular gallery exhibitions in 2015, the exhibition captivated thousands of viewers on a weekly basis with its vivid explorations of light in the space, and the richness and interplay of colors. The book brings questions of architecture to the fore, exploring how this particular body of light works function in space, occupying key positions in rooms that highlight how the rooms themselves are constructed. The exhibition is not only historically significant, as it mines early explorations in Flavin's practice, but many of the works are here reproduced for the first time in plates that accurately capture their colors. Above all, the photography reveals the unexpected and powerful interplay between the light of neighboring pieces and the space-the way the walls, floor, and various hues mingle to form unpredicted palettes that reveal what Michael Auping, following Donald Judd, calls the "exoskeleton" of the space. These works, with their immediate relationship to architecture, not only function as color experiments but as structural explorations in light, and in his essay, Auping, Chief Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, does a wonderful job revealing how Flavin's investigations of corners and corridors became an essential part of the way he understands spaces. Designed by McCall Associates, in close collaboration with the Flavin Estate, this catalogue presents an especially significant body of work, along with new scholarship by Michael Auping, offering a vital historical perspective on Flavin's practice.

From 1963, when he conceived the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), a single gold, fluorescent lamp that is installed on a diagonal on the wall--a work which marks the artist's first use of fluorescent light alone, until his death in 1996, Dan Flavin (1933-1996) produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially-available fluorescent lamps to create installations, or "situations" as he preferred to call them, of light and color. Through the construction of light, Flavin was able to literally establish and redefine space.

what ended up being Flavin's penultimate work just before the artist's death that same year. Two decades later, though, the red and white lights seem to be burning just as bright.--Stephanie Eckardt "W Magazine " Using everyday fluorescent lamps, the late conceptual artist Dan Flavin created sculptures that transformed the architecture of rooms and challenged notions of space.--Catie L'Heureux "New York Magazine "