American Dan Flavin's minimalist art is on display from February 19th to June 28th Cardi Gallery in Milan. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Estate of Dan Flavin and is accompanied by a illustrated catalogue which includes an essay by the esteemed Italian art critic German Celant.
American artist Dan Flavin, who died in 1996, is internationally recognized for his installations and sculptural works made exclusively with commercially available fluorescent lamps. The exhibition at the Cardi Gallery in Milan will present fourteen luminous works from the end of the 60s to the 90s which show the evolution of more than four decades of research by the artist on the notions of colour, light and sculptural space.
It was in the summer of 1961 that his prolific activity as an artist began. Indeed, while working as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Flavin he began making sketches for sculptures that incorporated electric lightsAnd. Later that same year, he translated his sketches into assemblages, which he called "icons," which juxtaposed lights with single-color painted Masonite constructions. In 1963, he removed the rectangular stand entirely and started working with his own fluorescent lamps. In 1968, Flavin expanded his sculptures to chamber-sized environments and filled an entire gallery with ultraviolet light at Documenta 4, Kassel, the year was 1968.
Flavin always emphatically denied that his sculptural light installations had any kind of transcendent, symbolic or sublime dimension, explaining that “It is what it is and it is nothing else”. He claimed that his works were simply fluorescent light that responded to a specific architectural environment. Using light as a medium, Flavin was able to redefine the way pictorial and sculptural space is perceived.
Major retrospectives of Daniel Flavin's work were organized by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 1969, the St. Louis Art Museum in 1973, the Kunsthalle Basel in 1975 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1989. The artist has also executed many commissions for public worksi, including the lighting of several platforms at New York's Grand Central Station in 1976.
In 1996, at the invitation of the Italian priest Giulio Greco, Dan Flavin created a site-specific project as a central element for the restoration and renovation of the church of Santa Maria Annunciata in Milan's Chiesa Rossa, designed by Giovanni Muzio in the 30s. In Italy, Dan Flavin has created a series of site specific works for Villa Panza in Varese.
