November 11, 2026–April 4, 2027
Bilbao 48001
Spain
Curator: Lauren Hinkson
Sponsor: Iberdrola
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Dan Flavin: Some Light, an exhibition devoted to the American artist Dan Flavin (b. 1933, Jamaica, New York; d. 1996, Riverhead, New York) and his production from the 1960s through the 1980s. The exhibition takes its title from Flavin’s first solo show of fluorescent light works, held in 1964 at Kaymar gallery in New York. Drawing on the Guggenheim’s holdings of Flavin’s work from the Panza Collection, with key loans from Dia Art Foundation in New York, the presentation follows Flavin from his early fluorescent constructions in white light to the room-scale chromatic installations of his later career. The show is sponsored by Iberdrola.
Flavin began to consider electric light as an artistic medium in the summer of 1961, while working as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Two years later, he affixed an unmodified fluorescent tube to his studio wall and that break with convention defined the rest of his practice. Working within deliberate limits, Flavin used commercially available fixtures in ten colors and four standard lengths, whose basic form he never altered. He first arranged the lights on walls or floors in simple modular repetitions and predetermined systems. By the mid-1960s, he had developed a vocabulary that engaged the surrounding space more directly including “corners,” “monuments,” “barriers,” and “corridors.” He called these arrangements “situations,” conceiving them in response to particular settings. Later works grew in scale and ambition, filling entire rooms with complex chromatic groupings.
Thoroughly modern and radical in his use of prefabricated materials, Flavin introduced a new visual vocabulary to art in the 1960s. His ethereal and arresting constructions left an indelible impression on his own contemporaries and generations to come. In Flavin’s words, “my icons do not raise up the blessed savior in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.”
