Series and Progressions

by Flavin, Dan

• ISBN13: 9783869301464
• ISBN10: 3869301465
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-01
• Publisher: David Zwirner Inc

Summary

This monograph is published on the occasion of Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions, the first exhibition of the artists work at David Zwirner since the gallery announced its representation of the Estate of Dan Flavin. This publication will examine Flavins use of progressions and serial structures, ideas that were central to the artists practice throughout his career. Flavin has been credited (by Mel Bochner) with being one of the first artists to make use of a basically progressional procedure, and the systematic arrangement of colour and light was an aspect of his work that not only led to it being characterized as Minimal art but which moreover influenced Conceptual artistic practices. The catalogue will feature a selection of exemplary work by the artist, ranging in date from 1963 to 1990. The first major monograph on Flavins work since the 2004 exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the artists travelling retrospective (organized in 2004 by the Dia Art Foundation in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Estate of Dan Flavin), Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions will include over 50 full-colour plates, in addition to a comprehensive selection of installation views and archival photographs and documents. Also included will be newly-commissioned texts on the artists work by noted Flavin scholar Tiffany Bell (who authored the artists catalogue raisonné), and by art historians Anne Rorimer and Richard Shiff, and an interview with Dan Graham. Additionally, a detailed illustrated chronology will document exhibitions of Flavins work, covering the years 20042010. Co-published with David Zwirner, New York.

Author Biography

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.