Dan Flavin — Installations from fluorescent light fixtures
2 min readFeb 17, 2019
Dan Flavin (April 1, 1933, Jamaica, New York — November 29, 1996, Riverhead, New York) was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.
In the early ’60s he began to experiment with the use of fluorescent lights mounted on painted wood armatures. He became one of the first Minimalists, concerned with real space as a formal device, industrial materials, and simplified forms. He used factory-made fluorescent lights in standard lengths and colours, thereby taking light as a found object. Flavin would use this basic format for the rest of his career, varying the number and scale of his pieces on the basis of space.
