From 1963, when he conceived the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), a single gold fluorescent lamp installed diagonally on a wall, until his death in 1996, Flavin 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 these light constructions, Flavin was able to literally establish and redefine space.
As curator Michael Govan observes, the grids count “among the most intense and concentrated of Flavin’s lights.” Constituting one of the artist’s most complex and nuanced chromatic investigations, these constructions are composed of an equal number of vertical fixtures facing backwards and horizontal fixtures facing forwards in varying color combinations. Situated in the corner of a room, they simultaneously project a blend of colors outward towards the viewer and inward into the corner, highlighting the architectural conditions of the space.
More than almost any other format Flavin worked with, the grids—which grew out of his cornered squares of the late 1960s—simultaneously engage both the phenomenological and the rational concerns that were central to the artist’s practice. As he described in a 1978 letter to Thomas Armstrong, then the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, who was in the process of acquiring a grid for the museum’s collection: “[The grid has] a rich contrast, front over rear, and an optical interplay … all modified by reflected color mixes and shadows of the grid structure itself. As an ensemble, this intense fluorescent light use abuse seems to me to be rare in my production. And I commend it all to you.”
Featured in the exhibition are Flavin’s first grids, untitled (for Mary Ann and Hal with fondest regards) 1 and 2 (both 1976), two eight-foot square constructions each composed of five pink lamps facing one direction and five green lamps facing the other in inverse configurations. These works debuted in Flavin’s solo exhibition at Otis Art Institute Gallery, Los Angeles in 1976 where they were installed kitty corner to one another in a single gallery—as they are here—and are dedicated to Hal Glicksman, who was at the time the gallery director, and his wife, Mary Ann.
A number of Flavin’s grids are dedicated to his longtime New York dealer, Leo Castelli, who began representing the artist in 1969. The exhibition will include untitled (for you, Leo, in long respect and affection) 1 and 2, two eight-foot grids from 1977 in which the artist begins to blend color more freely. First shown at Heiner Friedrich, Inc., in New York that year, these works each feature three yellow and three blue lamps facing one direction, and three green and three pink lamps facing the opposite direction. These constructions also represent Flavin’s first experimentations with scale in this format; the following year he made four-foot versions of these two works—untitled (for you, Leo, in long respect and affection) 3 and 4, which will also be on view—with four lamps facing outward and inward that he intended to be installed suspended across a corner.
