Dan Flavin Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Dan Flavin (1933 - 1996) was an American artist who worked primarily with fluorescent light. Born in New York, he served in the weather branch of the US Air Force and then at the National Weather Analysis Center. Read the full biography

Dan Flavin (1933 - 1996) was an American artist who worked primarily with fluorescent light. Born in New York, he served in the weather branch of the US Air Force and then at the National Weather Analysis Center. He had almost no formal education in painting other than attending four sessions at the Hans Hofmann School in New York, in 1956; but attended Columbia University 1957-9 to study art history. He made drawings and small paintings in a gestural abstract expressionist style and small constructions incorporating found objects; his first solo exhibition was held at the Judson Gallery in New York in 1961. He began in 1961 to create "icons" by combining electric lights with simply painted square facade constructions. In 1963 he abandoned them and began working with fluorescent tubes of any commercially available color. Since 1964 he has created a series of fluorescent installations for particular spaces, such as for Documenta 4 in Kassel 1968, the National Gallery of Canada 1969 and the St. Louis Art Museum 1973. He has lived in Garrison-on-Hudson and Bridgehampton, Long Island. A major museum retrospective dedicated to Flavin's work was organized by the Dia Art Foundation in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where it was first exhibited in 2004. The exhibition traveled from 2005 to 2007 to Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hayward Gallery, London; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Flavin's work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2008. In 2012, the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, presented a retrospective of the artist's drawings. From 2019 to 2020, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami presented a focused exhibition of the artist's works since the mid-1960s. In 2022, Collection Lambert in Avignon, France presented the solo exhibition Dan Flavin: Epiphany.