DaN Flavin

daN Flavin is a Artiste American plastics technician , born with Jamaica (New York) on April 1st 1933 and died with Riverhead (New York) in 1996.

Biography

Major figure of the Minimal art, daN Flavin grows with the the United States, in the Catholic religion and starts by following a formation of seminarist, but it gives up the priesthood and, after a military service in Korea (1954 - 1955), during which it starts to study art thanks to courses exempted by the Université of Maryland, returns to New York and briefly follows the courses of Hans Hoffmann School off Fine Arts before studying the Histoire of art in New School for Social Research (1956) then painting and the drawing with University Columbia of New York (1957 - 1959).

Its first tables reveal the influence of the abstract Expressionnisme, but since 1959, it starts to carry out joinings and assemblies. Its first personal exposure to Judson Gallery of New York in 1961 presents watercolours and assemblies.

At the summer 1961, whereas he works as guard with the museum of natural history of New York, Flavin carries out drawings of sculptures incorporating of the sources of light. Its work on the light can be read like a reference to the records of the Catholic church - candles, incense, songs, processions - which always inspired it. After decorated monochromic paintings of electric bulbs entitled Icons , carried out starting from the end of 1961, it carries out starting from 1963 parts containing industrial neon tubes, then installations always using this same material, which becomes the signature characteristic of its artistic vocabulary. By exploring the variations which allow the number, the color, dimensions of the tubes and their provision, it is a question of dematerializing space in order to analyze perception of it. This work receives a first personal exposure entitled Some Light in 1964 to Kaymar Gallery of New York.

In 1967, Flavin teaching is invited in Design with the Université of North Carolina to Greensboro. Starting from 1968, it starts to carry out installations of the size of a whole part; the same year, it decorates a whole art gallery with tubes with black light to the Documenta Kassel.

Between 1964 and 1982, daN Flavin carries out its more important project: a homage to the painter, sculptor and Russian architect Vladimir Tatline. It carries out a series of neon parts, for the majority entirely white, which evoke schematically the form of the Monument to the Third international (1920, remained with the state of project). With its neons which suggest silhouettes évanescentes, daN Flavin celebrates this architecture progressist, while underlining his conceptual character, unrealizable, even ghostly.

Works of daN Flavin, sometimes compared with the fabrics of Rothko, were exposed in places impossible to circumvent of the contemporary art like the Musée Guggenheim of New York (1971 and 1992, the second installation having been realized at the time of the reopening of the museum after restoration), the Museum off Contemporary Art of Chicago (1969), the National Gallery off Canada with Ottawa (1969) and Staatliche Kunsthalle of Baden-Baden (1989). In 1983, daN Flavin Art Institute was inaugurated with Bridgehampton (New York), permanent exposure conceived by the artist in a fire station refitted, opened with the public each summer.

It also presented its work in more strange places, for which it designed installations, such as the Central station of New York from which it illuminates the quays (1977) or the church Santa Maria Annunciata ( Chiesa Rossa ) of Milan (installation completed in 1997 after the death of the artist on the basis of drawing which it had left).

Work

A work of daN Flavin is initially defined, by the provision of tubes of fluorescent light then it is the luminous extension which determined its structure, its thickness, its volume; in this direction the dimension of work is regulated by the architecture (walls, ceiling, ground) which delimits it. Like says it Donald Judd, Flavin creates “particular visual states”, singular perceptions which gather, in the brittleness of the light, color, structure and space.

By invading space, the light of Flavin transforms it and often dematerializes it. The luminous bath has indeed as a property to abolish the borders between the surrounding one and surrounded which do not make any more that one and work becomes thus a “situation”, a place of perceptive experiments related to displacements of the spectator. With its works, Flavin achieves perfectly the mission of the Minimal art such as Judd defines it in Specific objects : to make so that the object merges with three dimensions of real space. Thanks to the recourse to the light, daN Flavin irradiates the space, as contaminated by the beauty and the spirituality of work. The context becomes its contents.

The tube of light used by Flavin has a function which is opposed completely to the tangible object of the traditional works of art since it is of him that spreads the luminous energy which will dissolve its own limits. Works of minimal art do not inspire a physical contact, it is not possible to cherish their structure or their surface as one can do it with a sculpture of Brancusi to feel of it the polish or the quality of material; with daN Flavin, work is really impalpable, one could not even pose its glance on it; it is for the artist a way of removing an emotional mode of relation often attached to the objects which one appreciates for example the patina of time in concerning. However, if the linearity of the tubes and the effects of inclusion of the spectator in space of work are specific to the minimal art, one can however put the question to know if the subtly coloured atmosphere of works of Flavin - rather near to the painting of Rothko - is not the sign of a latent mysticism which, from this point of view, would purely put this artist in margin of the “minimal” production.

References

Sources

minimalism, file on the site of the Center Georges-Pompidou
Biography of daN Flavin on the site of Dia Art Foundation
Biography of daN Flavin on the site of the Foundation Guggenheim

External bonds

Card artist of the MAMCO, Geneva
daN Flavin on the site www.artcyclopedia.com
Note on daN Flavin
Michael Govan, daN Flavin , Dia Art Foundation
Museo Villa Panza di Varese

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