Dan Flavin

“Flavin's idea was to make art out of off-the-rack industrial light fixtures. A few sizes. A handful of colors. Just follow his instructions. It seemed, as an approach, utterly impersonal and possibly not even art as people then knew it. But like so many other radical artistic reactions against Abstract Expressionism's stress on touch and raw emotion, it was the unlikely route to often ecstatic utterance. It consciously blurred the distinction between art and architecture, seizing architecture as part of art's sculptural vocabulary, incorporating corners, walls, doorways and windows, creating a category that was a melting pot of painting, sculpture and design…. His fluorescent tubes were not about transporting viewers elsewhere. They were about sharpening our attunement to the immediate surroundings.” —Michael Kimmelman in a 2004 New York Times review of the exhibition Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, which traveled internationally from 2004 to 2007