Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
3716 Washington Boulevard
St. Louis
314.754.1850
Dan Flavin:
Constructed Light
February 1-October 4, 2008

The experience of Dan Flavin’s work — sculptural installations made of mass-produced light fixtures and florescent tubes — in the architecture and shifting natural light of the Pulitzer building is the point of this exhibition, curated by Tiffany Bell, project director of the Dan Flavin catalogue raisonné. Seh currently serves as curator and archivist for Flavin Studio. The installation is realized with the oversight and assistance of Stephen Morse, Exhibition Coordinator and Conservator of Flavin Studio.

Flavin’s work encompasses the space it illuminates — inseparable from its architectural context. From works that cast light into the dark corners of a room, to corridor pieces emphasizing transitional space, to barriers blocking gallery areas, visitors are forced to reconsider how they move through the building.

This relationship between art and architecture is especially powerful within the Pulitzer building. The architecture, designed by Pritzker Prize-winner Tadao Ando, focuses on natural light and how it shifts throughout the building as the day and seasons progress. Visitors are therefore encouraged to return to the galleries at different times to view the ever-changing interaction between the natural light and that of Flavin’s work. In addition, the Pulitzer will be open from 6-9 p.m. the first Thursday of every month to enable the visitor’s experience during dusk and nighttime hours.

Many of Flavin’s works consist of the same configuration of fixtures. By altering only the color of the bulbs, new works with new titles are created. This aspect of Flavin’s work will be highlighted halfway through the Pulitzer exhibition when the lamps on a number of the art works will be switched. At this point, a new iteration of Flavin’s works will be created, thus allowing for an entirely different experience of color throughout the building.

Dan Flavin (April 1, 1933 Jamaica, New York-November 29, 1996 Riverhead, New York) first conceived of using electric light as art in 1961, the same year he married his first wife Sonja Severdija. The first works to incorporate electric light were his "icons" series: eight colored square box-forms, constructed by the artist and his then wife Sonja, with fluorescent lamps and incandescent bulbs attached to their sides and sometimes beveled edges. One of these "icons" was dedicated to Flavin's twin brother David, who died of polio in 1962. The diagonal of personal ecstasy (the diagonal of May 25, 1963) (1963) was his first mature work, marking the beginning of Flavin's exclusive use of fluorescent light. Over the decades that followed, he continued to use fluorescent light to explore color, light and sculptural space in works that filled gallery interiors, taking a variety of forms including "corner pieces", "barriers" and "corridors". Most of Flavin's works were untitled with a dedication in parenthesis to friends, artists, critics and other individuals, the most famous of which include his Monuments to V Tatlin, in homage to Russian constructivist sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, which he continued to produce between 1964 and 1990. Flavin studied art history for a short time at the New School for Social Research, and drawing and painting at Columbia University. Flavin married his second wife, artist Tracy Harris, at the Guggenheim Museum, in 1992.

There is a small museum, the Dan Flavin Art Institute, dedicated to Flavin's work in a converted firehouse in Bridgehampton, New York.

Dan Flavin; untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977; Photograph Billy Jim; © Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.