Untitled (to Brad Gillaugh) is emblematic of Dan Flavin’s mature work. Made up of red, cool white, and pink fluorescent light tubes, the sculpture pays homage to Brad Gillaugh, a former operations manager at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York who was involved with several of Flavin’s exhibitions. Despite dedicating the work to his close personal friend, a common practice for the artist at this time, the significance of this work lies in the semantics of its formal language. A true Minimalist, Flavin was always reluctant to assign any kind of transcendent meaning to his work. Like many of his fluorescent sculptures, this piece gives off a far-reaching glow when mounted on the wall, creating a relationship between art and architecture. Untitled (to Brad Gillaugh) conceptualizes light as matter. The luminescence takes on agency, warping the composition of the room it inhabits. When in the presence of the work, this distortion creates a stunning and inimitable visual sensation.

Dan Flavin was an American artist and pioneer of Minimalism, best known for his seminal installations of light fixtures. His illuminated sculptures offer a rigorous formal and conceptual investigation of space and light, wherein the artist arranged commercial fluorescent bulbs into differing geometric compositions. “I like art as thought better than art as work,” he once said. “I've always maintained this. It's important to me that I don't get my hands dirty. It's not because I'm instinctively lazy. It's a declaration: art is thought.” Born in New York in 1933, Flavin showed an interest in art during his early adulthood, studying first at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and later at Columbia University. Working exclusively with fluorescent lights by 1961, he embraced the temporary nature of the medium—which often shattered or blew out—and was happy to replace parts of his works as needed. His dedication to simple forms and use of industrial materials allied his practice to the work of both Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. Flavin has been the subject of major retrospectives at both the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dia: Beacon in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.

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