Exceptional Works: Dan Flavin

With the simplest of elements, Dan Flavin (1933–1996) produced a body of work that changed the course of twentieth century art. Using commercially available fluorescent lamps to create installations (or “situations,” as he preferred to call them), Flavin created light constructions that literally establish and redefine space. For Art Basel Unlimited 2024, the gallery is pleased to present untitled (to Tina and Christoph and their Palladio) (1972–1973).

Executed early in Flavin’s career, untitled (to Tina and Christoph and their Palladio) is a prime example of his approach to conceptualizing, activating, and transforming space with light and color—strategies that would become highly influential to his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists.

This work was recently presented in Dan Flavin / Donald Judd: Doha, curated by Michael Govan at Qatar Museums Gallery – Al Riwaq, Doha, in 2023. A related work, untitled (to a man, George McGovern) 2 (1972), is currently on view in the major exhibition Dan Flavin. Dedications in Lights at Kunstmuseum Basel.

In the early 1970s, Flavin began using circular fluorescent lights in his installations. Untitled (to Tina and Christoph and their Palladio) animates the four corners of a room with a vertical configuration of cool and warm white light. This work was first exhibited in 1973 in Cologne at the Kunsthalle Köln in Dan Flavin: three installations in fluorescent light.

This work is dedicated to the artist’s friends Katharina (Tina) and Christoph Sattler (an architect himself) of Munich, who shared an admiration of Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580).

Throughout his career, Flavin experimented with the subtly chromatic and perceptual possibilities afforded by variations of white fluorescent light (cool white, daylight, warm white, and soft white). Flavin’s experimentations with white lights exemplify and distill—in this restricted palette—his minimal and conceptual approach, showing the varied and nuanced ways in which his light constructions activate the surrounding space. Untitled (to Tina and Christoph and their Palladio) features adjacent vertical rows of warm and cool white fixtures—a combination a critic once described as “peach-juice against paving-stones, if one had to define the two.”