Kunstmuseum St. Gallen museum of art presents Dan Flavin Lights an exhibition on view 16 March – 18 August, 2013.
Dan Flavin, the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), 1963. The Estate Collection David Zwirner. Foto: Billy Jim, New York. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York© 2012 Stephen Flavin / Pro Litteris, Zürich.
The exhibition provides a representative overview of Flavin’s light works for the first time in Switzerland. Containing around thirty works, the exhibition explains the artist’s development from painting to creating light works based on selected situations (1961–1964). It spans the range from his key individual works created with fluorescent tubes up to the more recent large-scale works.
Flavin’s stance against the pictorial, narrative, and symbolic is highly pronounced; indeed, his relationship with art history identifies him as an artist who crosses borders to venture beyond systematic relationships. With monuments for V. Tatlin, 1964, he not only devoted one of his own series of work to the Russian Constructivist artist-engineer, Vladimir Tatlin, but also shared the Russian avant-garde worship of icons. From the first “golden” tube set diagonally to the wall (diagonal of May 25, 1963), to series of his work such as monuments for V. Tatlin, through to large-scale works such as untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg), 1972-1973, the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen demonstrates the scope of an artistic concept that has been developed with impressive consistency as well as great candour. In this exhibition, a selection of Flavin’s classical works with fluorescent tubes is complemented with the earlier main series of icons (1961-1964), and also with drawings that relate to individual exhibited light works.
