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Throwback Thursday: Fluorescent Light Sculptures by Dan Flavin in 1972

May 25, 2017

Installation view of Fluorescent Light Sculptures by Dan Flavin. Image courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Digital Assets Collection and Archives, Buffalo, New York.

Fluorescent Light Sculptures by Dan Flavin (May 14-June 25, 1972) was part of a series of exhibitions organized to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the opening of the 1962 Building. It featured several of Flavin's corner constructions, including untitled (to Donna) 6, 1971, and was on view in the stairwell connecting the 1962 and 1905 Buildings, as well as in one gallery in the 1905 Building. Flavin created a poster for the exhibition and attended the Gala and Preview on May 13, 1972. 

Here's how Flavin described his installations for the exhibition to Albright-Knox Curator James N. Wood:

"What I have in mind to display is in two parts, the first, for one gallery, is three near-square, cornered installations, each eight feet high, each in different combination of pink, yellow and blue of fore-lighting from horizontal single strips top and bottom with same colored tubes, and back lighting from vertically sided two-lighters of like colored pairs of tubes which clearly cross-object each other to opposite walls behind the framing structure. Together, they are a finally selected set of (to Donna) variations (an ‘a’ group reversal of side colors) which I've been concentratedely researching periodically since last summer, with test exposition in Los Angeles (in Doug Christmas’s Ace Gallery) and in New York (in the Leo Castelli Gallery). The ‘Donna’ of the dedication is a young, handsome, intelligent Angelino who has worked with the Ace Gallery and in filmmaking. It seems to me that the difficult somewhat vulgar pink, yellow, and blue that I’ve combined for these installations could be located somewhere, maybe anywhere, in Los Angeles.

For the staircase . . . is an appropriately tall installation most peculiar to the situation available (properly dedicated to Mr. Knox, President of the Gallery, and Mr. Smith, Gallery Director, together), my first actual applicant of circular fluorescent light, all the way up in each of the four enclosing corners."

Installation view of Fluorescent Light Sculptures by Dan Flavin. Image courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Digital Assets Collection and Archives, Buffalo, New York.

Dan Flavin (right) with Albright-Knox Curator James N. Wood (left) at the Gala and Preview for Fluorescent Light Sculptures by Dan Flavin on May 13, 1972. Image courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Digital Assets Collection and Archives, Buffalo, New York.