“I liked fluorescent light as a kind of typical modern light source that was so customary and taken for granted, that it would be ironic for me to abuse it”
As with many of the most significant works from the minimalist art movement, Untitled (For the Vernas on Opening Anew) radically transforms it’s architectural surroundings with simple means. In the present work, Dan Flavin masterfully engages the space surrounding the sculpture, shrouding the work’s immediate surroundings in a soft pastel veil emanating from the cool blue glow of repeated horizontal neon strips, interrupted only by a protruding beam of pink neon. The result is a sublime, entrancing experience, that heightens the viewer’s awareness of their own surroundings.
Working as a security guard at the American Museum of Natural History, Flavin became transfixed with the potential of electrical lighting as a defining artistic medium. This realisation “that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition" liberated the artist’s practice (Dan Flavin, ‘…in daylight or cool white,’ Artforum, December 1965). In 1963, Flavin set a lone fluorescent light on a 45-degree diagonal against the wall, and in doing so experienced the “ecstasy” of artistic breakthrough. In his own words “There was no need to compose this lamp in place; it implanted itself directly, dynamically, dramatically in my workroom wall - a buoyant and relentless gaseous image which, through brilliance, betrayed its physical presence into approximate invisibility” (Ibid.).
“There was no need to compose this lamp in place; it implanted itself directly, dynamically, dramatically in my workroom wall - a buoyant and relentless gaseous image which, through brilliance, betrayed its physical presence into approximate invisibility”
Flavin dedicated subsequent decades of his career to exclusively interrogate the luminous claritys emanating from this industrial readymade. These neon works marked the pioneering dawn of minimalism, fracturing the hegemony of the gestural, impassioned world of abstract expressionism and paving the way for the minimalist art movement that indelibly shaped the trajectory of twentieth century art history. Indeed, Flavin’s practice stands at the apex of some of the most significant developments of art theory and contemporary sculptural philosophy
In keeping with the artist’s practice of dedicating his works to close friends and relatives, the present work was created for the 1993 opening of Annemarie Verna Gallery’s at 42 Neptunstrasse in Zurich, and was exhibited at the gallery’s inaugural exhibition.