Dan Flavin

The Artist
Flavin Judd
Ace Gallery, Los Angeles
Haunch of Venison, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2005

Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Kid Stuff?, July - September 1971, cat. no. 14, n.p. (checklist) (edition no. unknown)
London, Haunch of Venison, Dan Flavin: Works from the 1960s, February - March 2005

Germano Celant, Madly in Love: The Luigi and Peppino Agrati Collection, Milan, 2002, cat. no. 166, p. 154, illustrated in color (edition no. 1/3)
Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell, Dan Flavin: the Complete Lights, 1961-1996, New Haven and London, 2004, cat. no. 42, p. 230, illustrated in color and artist's diagram, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., London, Barbican Art Gallery, Colour after Klein, 2005, p. 90, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown)

This work is in excellent condition. It is wired for European electrical current. The metal fixtures all appear stable and intact. There is some very faint soiling on the fixtures from airborne dirt and dust, as well as handling.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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The moment Dan Flavin radically mounted a lone fluorescent light against the wall marked the pioneering dawn of Minimalism, a movement whose austere, profoundly rational aesthetic philosophy would transform the next half-century of art-making. Experiencing the “ecstasy” of artistic breakthrough, from that point forward Flavin would exclusively explore the luminous clarity emanating from this industrial readymade. Executed only a year later, Untitled (to Mr. and Mrs. Giuseppe Agrati) of 1964 is of exceptional prominence and significance as one of Flavin’s earliest multi-colored works, bearing a consecutively arranged prismatic sequence of pink, daylight, green, and yellow fluorescent lights. Abutted against one another, each 8-foot tube asserts its own vibrant chromatic quality while the space between exemplifies Flavin’s fascination with the exuberant fusion of different hues, as the glow of each color radiates together near the center to produce an entirely new color on the spectrum. Like the haze that emanates ethereally off a rainbow, the poetic hum of color that reverberates from Flavin’s light envelops the space around it in a brilliant fauvist fog. Magnificently poised in its eight-foot tall stature, the present work is a paragon of the eponymous style for which Flavin is widely regarded.

The artist used only commercial, readily available fluorescent lights which come with limited formats, a finite palette, and a pre-determined parameter of brightness; the artist’s hand is erased, and yet the sculpture is nevertheless charged with Flavin’s sweeping creativity and reductive thoughtfulness. Appropriating the bulbs whose mass industrial production served to illuminate the conduits of advertising that Pop artists were already probing to the fullest extent, and with only a few circumscribed variations of color, arrangement, and size, Flavin rendered light in its purest form—at once metaphysical and concrete. In its majestic command of the wall, the present work demonstrates Flavin’s exceptionally acute sensitivity to arrangement and context, emblematic of his interest in how works occupy three-dimensional space within a particular environment. Flavin’s creative process rested not only in the organization of light in varying lengths and colors within a given format, but also in engineering the optical chromatic effect that his sculptures exude into their contiguous spatial environments.

Michael Govan considers Flavin’s early chromatic explorations as seminal in his artistic development. As Govan writes of Flavin’s 1964 four-bulb works in color, of which the present work is a key example, “Many particular aspects of color in light, and of commercial fluorescent light in particular, were incorporated in Flavin’s work as he gained confidence and experience with his medium. For example, in light, green is not only a primary color, but the addition of more colors produces white, whereas the result in paint would be black… It presents bright pastel colors directly to the viewer, but… it creates an over-all white light made by the four colors blending nearly into a full spectrum.” (Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art (and travelling), Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, 2005, p. 59) Investigating every nuance of color, Flavin’s bulbs allow for the possibility of adjusting the chromatic intensity based on color temperature—presenting the possibility for various spectrums, Flavin introduces a complex plethora of potential variations within a highly constrained format. Subtle, multivalent, and ineffably poetic, Untitled (to Mr. and Mrs. Giuseppe Agrati) appears simple, yet resonates with concentrated profundity. The precisely arranged industrial standard fluorescent lamps challenge and elude their material objecthood by emitting an unbounded, splendid luminosity. Fittingly, both the space the work occupies and its beholder are inescapably encompassed and transformed.

Flavin’s very first diagonal bulb paid tribute to Constantin Brancusi, whose totemic columns mirror Flavin’s own sculptures in their formal simplicity and apparent capacity for limitless distention. Realizing the potentiality opened by his first diagonal for an endless extension of elements in a variety of configurations, Untitled (to Mr. and Mrs. Giuseppe Agrati) epitomizes one of Flavin’s first mature experimentations with sequencing, seriality, and progressions, a stylistic touchstone that would permeate the next thirty years of the artist’s practice. Embodying the surging skyward potentiality of a Brancusi, while emitting light from its inner core similar to Mark Rothko’s color-fields or Barnett Newman’s “zip”, the present work is a paragon of Flavin’s oeuvre, which quaked the grounds of art history from within its very foundation and illuminated a new trajectory for its future.