Dan Flavin used fluorescent tube lights arranged to create light, color, and space. He explained his idea like this: “One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.” This was a radical approach to artmaking in the 1960s and ’70s in New York, where painters and sculptors working in this manner called themselves Minimalists. They used industrial materials and tried to make invisible any mark of the artist. Imagery was abstracted to essential geometric forms, sometimes only one shape or one color. Minimalist artists were reacting against 1950s artists who made emotional works showing the painterly effects of the artist’s hand.
Flavin was born in Jamaica, New York, to an Irish Catholic family. Although his father planned for him to enter the priesthood, Flavin joined the military and began to study art in Korea. After his military service, he worked odd jobs. While working as a security guard at the American Museum of Natural History, Flavin made a sketch of his first light sculpture.
By the time he was 30 years old, Flavin began to work only in fluorescent fixtures and tubes. He experimented with colors, intensities of light, structure, and formlessness. He took fluorescent lights out of their everyday settings. This gave them a new and sometimes mysterious meaning. He called these works his corners, corridors, and barriers.
Untitled (for Donna) is a corner work about light, an element that you can see, but not touch. The light fixtures frame the empty space where you see the interaction of the colored light.
It was dedicated to Donna Vaccarino, who worked at ACE Gallery in Los Angeles, where the first realized works in the “Donna” series were exhibited in 1971. According to Flavin’s Catalog Raisonné, Flavin associated the gaudiness of the colors in the series with Los Angeles.
