Don’t come see this show hungover. Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light installations – or ‘situations’, as the late American minimalist called them – are real eye-melters. They sting the pupils and singe the sensitive brain. And they’re totally inescapable: you can’t look away like you would with a painting; the light they pulse out fills and dominates the whole room. It’s his big trick: he reconfigures space not with physical objects, but with light, changes the dimensions and feel of a room with just red, pink, blue, green, yellow and four shades of white.
The works here are a recreation of two 1976 exhibitions in New York and Cologne, sourced from the same kind of commercially available fluorescent lighting Flavin used back then (which means you can just pop to Homebase and make your own Dan Flavin if you fancy). Four long pink tubes fill the first room, each accompanied by a smaller coloured sibling of yellow, blue or green. It hurts to get too close, it’s just too bright, so the room is halved, like there’s a laser barrier keeping you away.