Year: 1990
Medium: blue, yellow, pink, red and green fluorescent light
Dimensions: 243.8 x 26.7 x 61 cm (96 x 10 1/2 x 4 in.)
Edition: No. 1 of 5
Acquired from Phillips, 2023
In 1963, Flavin created “the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi)” as an homage to the sculptor Brancusi, who is also considered to be a pioneer of minimalism, and his work “Endless Column.”, Throughout almost 30 years of his entire career as an artist, Flavin dedicated his works to hometown acquaintances and artists he admired, with his respect reflected in the subtitles of the pieces. This work is one of ten works that the artist created for Ad Reinhardt, an abstract painter of the same period. Reinhardt is perhaps best known for his series of black abstract paintings. At first glance, it appears as if they have simply been painted over with black, but in fact, they are divided by grids, and painted with overlays of incredibly deep hues of blues, reds, and greens—just enough to be noticeable. The differences in nuance of these different blacks are so subtle that they are only perceptible at length. When looking at Flavin’s work, the light from principally blue, red, and green fluorescent lamps fills the space, each color gently interfering with one another. Flavin himself described this kind of work with light as “situational” works, which are referred to as installations today. His site-specific works from the 1970s onwards could be thought of as the culmination of his theoretical approach, in which the “situation” itself, the very space governed by the light, becomes the work. Despite the difficulty in recreating Reinhardt’s black with the use of light, the spirituality of the work is a continuation of Flavin’s aesthetic sensibilities. Reinhardt left us with the maxim “Art as Art,” and Flavin was well aware of that artist’s pursuit of the purity of art; accordingly, black and light may both have appeared to him as equally revelatory of the nature of art.
