Dan Flavin’s Iconic Light Works Go On View at David Zwirner New York
The Minimalist artist's "grids," a key body of work that he began in 1976, are on display through February 21, featuring rare loans from important public collections
This month, gallery hoppers will be immersed in a dreamy light bath when they visit David Zwirner’s new exhibition, “Grids,” dedicated to Dan Flavin’s light sculptures in the namesake form. Tucked into the corners of the gallery’s 20th Street space, the Minimalist maestro’s arresting light tubes cut through and overlap one another, beaming bright hues of green, blue, and pink within the sprawling, industrial gallery space.
Flavin and his fluorescent tubes are among Post-war art history’s most storied pairings between an artist and their signature material, and the presentation of these works from the 1970s and the ‘80s reveals the fascinating trajectory the artist took to get there. The gallery’s senior partner, Kristine Bell, notes that they take pride in staging Flavin’s work “in the way he would have during his lifetime.” She adds: “Seeing the works installed in this way leads to an understanding of his intentions on a deeper level.” The East Coast stalwart who passed away in 1996 started exploring the mesh format in 1976 with green and pink tubes and mounted seminal shows in this direction, starting with a solo show at Los Angeles’s Otis Art Institute Gallery in 1976 and, eleven years later, at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Bell admits spending years looking at an archival picture of three copies of a single grid joined together from the Castelli show and wonders about the possibility of installing a “barrier-like structure” similarly at a corner of their gallery.
The new show, which realizes the gallerist’s dream, features re-creations from both historical shows, exposing the artist’s meditations on repetition, abstraction, and rhythm to a new audience in the age of rapid technological developments and shortened attention spans. In fact, the notion of grid at the time of imagery flux through social media, particularly Instagram, has its own resonance, echoing with photographs posted on grid layouts and even memes. Against this visual cacophony, Flavin’s geometrically sharp and visually enigmatic forms bring viewers face-to-face with their own imagination, inviting each pair of eyes to internalize the artist’s introspective take on both order and chaos through their own reading. Similar to other pioneering Minimalist artists such as Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt, who were fascinated by the grid form, Flavin’s use of a geometric orchestration resonates with transcendence. The intense luminosity and unexpected juxtaposition of poppy colors, on the other hand, challenge the viewers’s expectations of optic over-saturation, all while painting the walls and the floors with washes of hues not unlike an abstract painting. With an invitation to slow down, the presentation invites the viewer to delve into Flavin’s open-ended vocabulary. Bell also recognizes the works’s relationship to physical interiors and eventually the audience’s internalization of them through “providing a sensorial experience.”
Among the standouts are two works dedicated to Leo Castelli who championed Flavin’s practice through multiple shows at his Soho space. untitled (for you, Leo, in long respect and affection) 1 and 2 (both 1977) are generously-colored experiments on the grid, equally containing and releasing a kinetic energy with their immediate auras. Their kaleidoscopic impacts and uncompromisingly bright radiances prove the powerful dialogue Minimalism conveys with the viewer despite the movement’s common trait of a visual muteness.
Adjacent to these works are other iterations dedicated to the dealer, such as untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery) (1987), editions of which are currently in the collections of the Guggenheim, Princeton University Art Museum, and SFMOMA. Reaching 24 feet in width, the grand work of red, pink, yellow, blue, and green light tubes is recreated for the first time in this 2025 edition. Bell particularly enjoys the grid pieces’s connection to the exhibition space in their own particular installations. “It is also somewhat rare that Flavin would choose to suspend his works above the ground as he did with the four-foot grids presented here,” she says. “But when you’re in the space, it becomes clear that he wanted you to have a bodily relationship to the work.”
“Dan Flavin: Grids” is on view at David Zwirner through February 21, 2026