photos: © Stefan Altenburger . + Vito Schnabel Gallery
Fluorescent light was commercially available and its defined systems of standard sized tubes and colors defied the very tenets of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, from which the artist sought to break free. In opposition to the gestural and hand-crafted, these impersonal prefabricated industrial objects offered, what Donald Judd described as “…a means new to art.”.Seizing the anonymity of the fluorescent tube, Flavin employed it as a simple and direct means to implement a whole new artistic language of his own. He worked within this self-imposed reductivist framework for the rest of his career, endlessly experimenting with serial and systematic compositions to wed formal relationships of luminous light, color, and sculptural space.
Vito Schnabel Gallery
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