What a way to open 2023. David Zwirner stages two spectacular exhibitions dedicated to Light and Space luminary Dan Flavin in its London and NY galleries.

Featured across two floors and exploring our relationship to space and colour, Dan Flavin: colored fluorescent light in London re-stages the artist’s landmark presentations at Leo Castelli Gallery and Galerie Heiner Friedrich in New York and Cologne in 1976, marking one of Flavin’s most significant moments in his career. A parallel exhibition, Dan Flavin: Kornblee Gallery 1967, is on view at the gallery’s 34 East 69th Street location in New York, this time also featuring preparatory drawings and archival materials documenting these early shows.

“I know now that I can reiterate any part of my fluorescent light system as adequate. Elements of parts of that system simply alter in situation installation. They lack the look of history. I sense no stylistic or structural development of any significance within my proposal—only shifts in partitive emphasis—modifying and addable without intrinsic change…. It is as though my system synonymizes its past, present, and future states without incurring a loss of relevance.” Dan Flavin, “Some Remarks,” Artforum, 1966

From 1963 until his death in 1996, Flavin produced a pioneering body of work that repurposed commercially and mundane available fluorescent lamps (think Marcel Duchamp) to create “situations,” in the artist’s words, harmoniously merging light, colour and questioning the idea space perception. Each of the nine colours that comprised the artist’s visual palette during these foundational years appear in London’s historical location, viewable from the street.

David Zwirner has represented the Estate of Dan Flavin since 2009, and this will be the gallery’s first presentation of the artist’s work in London. A historical moment in its own right, this is the show of the season.

Image: Copyright Dan Flavin, courtesy David Zwirner. Photo: Anna Arca